The Stand

Chapter 1

Hapscomb’s Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston. Tonight the regulars were there, sitting by the cash register, drinking beer, talking idly, watching the bugs fly into the big lighted sign.

It was Bill Hapscomb’s station, so the others deferred to him even though he was a pure fool. They would have expected the same deferral if they had been gathered together in one of their business establishments. Except they had none. In Arnette, it was hard times. In 1980 the town had had two industries, a factory that made paper products (for picnics and barbecues, mostly) and a plant that made electronic calculators. Now the paper factory was shut down and the calculator plant was ailing—they could make them a lot cheaper in Taiwan, it turned out, just like those portable TVs and transistor radios.

Norman Bruett and Tommy Wannamaker, who had both worked in the paper factory, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago. Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week. Victor Palfrey was retired and smoked stinking home-rolled cigarettes, which were all he could afford.

“Now what I say is this,” Hap told them, putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward. “They just gotta say screw this inflation shit. Screw this national debt shit. We got the presses and we got the paper. We’re gonna run off fifty million thousand-dollar bills and hump them right the Christ into circulation.”

Palfrey, who had been a machinist until 1984, was the only one present with sufficient self-respect to point out Hap’s most obvious damfool statements. Now, rolling another of his shitty-smelling cigarettes, he said: “That wouldn’t get us nowhere. If they do that, it’ll be just like Richmond in the last two years of the States War. In those days, when you wanted a piece of gingerbread, you gave the baker a Confederate dollar, he’d put it on the gingerbread, and cut out a piece just that size. Money’s just paper, you know.”

“I know some people don’t agree with you,” Hap said sourly. He picked up a greasy red plastic paper-holder from his desk. “I owe these people. And they’re starting to get pretty itchy about it.”

Stuart Redman, who was perhaps the quietest man in Arnette, was sitting in one of the cracked plastic Woolco chairs, a can of Pabst in his hand, looking out the big service station window at Number 93. Stu knew about poor. He had grown up that way right here in town, the son of a dentist who had died when Stu was seven, leaving his wife and two other children besides Stu.

His mother had gotten work at the Red Ball Truck Stop just outside of Arnette—Stu could have seen it from where he sat right now if it hadn’t burned down in 1979. It had been enough to keep the four of them eating, but that was all. At the age of nine, Stu had gone to work, first for Rog Tucker, who owned the Red Ball, helping to unload trucks after school for thirty-five cents an hour, and then at the stockyards in the neighboring town of Braintree, lying about his age to get twenty backbreaking hours of labor a week at the minimum wage.

Now, listening to Hap and Vic Palfrey argue on about money and the mysterious way it had of drying up, he thought about the way his hands had bled at first from pulling the endless handtrucks of hides and guts. He had tried to keep that from his mother, but she had seen, less than a week after he started. She wept over them a little, and she hadn’t been a woman who wept easily. But she hadn’t asked him to quit the job. She knew what the situation was. She was a realist.

Some of the silence in him came from the fact that he had never had friends, or the time for them. There was school, and there was work. His youngest brother, Dev, had died of pneumonia the year he began at the yards, and Stu had never quite gotten over that. Guilt, he supposed. He had loved Dev the best… but his passing had also meant there was one less mouth to feed.

In high school he had found football, and that was something his mother had encouraged even though it cut into his work hours. “You play,” she said. “If you got a ticket out of here, it’s football, Stuart. You play. Remember Eddie Warfield.” Eddie Warfield was a local hero. He had come from a family even poorer than Stu’s own, had covered himself with glory as quarterback of the regional high school team, had gone on to Texas A&M with an athletic scholarship, and had played for ten years with the Green Bay Packers, mostly as a second-string quarterback but on several memorable occasions as the starter. Eddie now owned a string of fast-food restaurants across the West and Southwest, and in Arnette he was an enduring figure of myth. In Arnette, when you said “success,” you meant Eddie Warfield.

Stu was no quarterback, and he was no Eddie Warfield. But it did seem to him as he began his junior year in high school that there was at least a fighting chance for him to get a small athletic scholarship… and then there were work-study programs, and the school’s guidance counselor had told him about the NDEA loan program.

Then his mother had gotten sick, had become unable to work. It was cancer. Two months before he graduated from high school, she had died, leaving Stu with his brother Bryce to support. Stu had turned down the athletic scholarship and had gone to work in the calculator factory. And finally it was Bryce, three years’ Stu’s junior, who had made it out. He was now in Minnesota, a systems analyst for IBM. He didn’t write often, and the last time he had seen Bryce was at the funeral, after Stu’s wife had died—died of exactly the same sort of cancer that had killed his mother. He thought that Bryce might have his own guilt to carry… and that Bryce might be a little ashamed of the fact that his brother had turned into just another good old boy in a dying Texas town, spending his days doing time in the calculator plant, and his nights either down at Hap’s or over at the Indian Head drinking Lone Star beer.

The marriage had been the best time, and it had only lasted eighteen months. The womb of his young wife had borne a single dark and malignant child. That had been four years ago. Since, he had thought of leaving Arnette, searching for something better, but small-town inertia held him—the low siren song of familiar places and familiar faces. He was well liked in Arnette, and Vic Palfrey had once paid him the ultimate compliment of calling him “Old Time Tough.”

As Vic and Hap chewed it out, there was still a little dusk left in the sky, but the land was in shadow. Cars didn’t go by on 93 much now, which was one reason that Hap had so many unpaid bills. But there was a car coming now, Stu saw.

It was still a quarter of a mile distant, the day’s last light putting a dusty shine on what little chrome was left to it. Stu’s eyes were sharp, and he made it as a very old Chevrolet, maybe a ‘75. A Chevy, no lights on, doing no more than fifteen miles an hour, weaving all over the road. No one had seen it yet but him.

“Now let’s say you got a mortgage payment on this station,” Vic was saying, “and let’s say it’s fifty dollars a month.”

“It’s a hell of a lot more than that.”

“Well, for the sake of the argument, let’s say fifty. And let’s say the Federals went ahead and printed you a whole carload of money. Well then those bank people would turn round and want a hundred and fifty. You’d be just as poorly off.”

“That’s right,” Henry Carmichael added. Hap looked at him, irritated. He happened to know that Hank had gotten in the habit of taking Cokes out of the machine without paying the deposit, and furthermore, Hank knew he knew, and if Hank wanted to come in on any side it ought to be his.

“That ain’t necessarily how it would be,” Hap said weightily from the depths of his ninth-grade education. He went on to explain why.

Stu, who only understood that they were in a hell of a pinch, tuned Hap’s voice down to a meaningless drone and watched the Chevy pitch and yaw its way on up the road. The way it was going Stu didn’t think it was going to make it much farther. It crossed the white line and its lefthand tires spurned up dust from the left shoulder. Now it lurched back, held its own lane briefly, then nearly pitched off into the ditch. Then, as if the driver had picked out the big lighted Texaco station sign as a beacon, it arrowed toward the tarmac like a projectile whose velocity is very nearly spent. Stu could hear the worn-out thump of its engine now, the steady gurgle-and-wheeze of a dying carb and a loose set of valves. It missed the lower entrance and bumped up over the curb. The fluorescent bars over the pumps were reflecting off the Chevy’s dirt-streaked windshield so it was hard to see what was inside, but Stu saw the vague shape of the driver roll loosely with the bump. The car showed no sign of slowing from its relentless fifteen.

“So I say with more money in circulation you’d be—”

“Better turn off your pumps, Hap,” Stu said mildly.

“The pumps? What?”

Norm Bruett had turned to look out the window. “Christ on a pony,” he said.

Stu got out of his chair, leaned over Tommy Wannamaker and Hank Carmichael, and flicked off all eight switches at once, four with each hand. So he was the only one who didn’t see the Chevy as it hit the gas pumps on the upper island and sheared them off.

It plowed into them with a slowness that seemed implacable and somehow grand. Tommy Wannamaker swore in the Indian Head the next day that the taillights never flashed once. The Chevy just kept coming at a steady fifteen or so, like the pace car in the Tournament of Roses parade. The undercarriage screeched over the concrete island, and when the wheels hit it everyone but Stu saw the driver’s head swing limply and strike the windshield, starring the glass.

The Chevy jumped like an old dog that had been kicked and plowed away the hi-test pump. It snapped off and rolled away, spilling a few dribbles of gas. The nozzle came unhooked and lay glittering under the fluorescents.

They all saw the sparks produced by the Chevy’s exhaust pipe grating across the cement, and Hap, who had seen a gas station explosion in Mexico, instinctively shielded his eyes against the fireball he expected. Instead, the Chevy’s rear end flirted around and fell off the pump island on the station side. The front end smashed into the low-lead pump, knocking it off with a hollow bang.

Almost deliberately, the Chevrolet finished its 360-degree turn, hitting the island again, broadside this time. The rear end popped up on the island and knocked the regular gas pump asprawl. And there the Chevy came to rest, trailing its rusty exhaust pipe behind it. It had destroyed all three of the gas pumps on that island nearest the highway. The motor continued to run choppily for a few seconds and then quit. The silence was so loud it was alarming.

“Holy moly,” Tommy Wannamaker said breathlessly. “Will she blow, Hap?”

“If it was gonna, it already woulda,” Hap said, getting up. His shoulder bumped the map case, scattering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona every whichway. Hap felt a cautious sort of jubilation. His pumps were insured, and the insurance was paid up. Mary had harped on the insurance ahead of everything.

“Guy must have been pretty drunk,” Norm said.

“I seen his taillights,” Tommy said, his voice high with excitement. “They never flashed once. Holy moly! If he’d a been doing sixty we’d all be dead now.”

They hurried out of the office, Hap first and Stu bringing up the rear. Hap, Tommy, and Norm reached the car together. They could smell gas and hear the slow, clocklike tick of the Chevy’s cooling engine. Hap opened the driver’s side door and the man behind the wheel spilled out like an old laundry sack.

“God-damn,” Norm Bruett shouted, almost screamed. He turned away, clutched his ample belly, and was sick. It wasn’t the man who had fallen out (Hap had caught him neatly before he could thump to the pavement) but the smell that was issuing from the car, a sick stench compounded of blood, fecal matter, vomit, and human decay. It was a ghastly rich sick-dead smell.

A moment later Hap turned away, dragging the driver by the armpits. Tommy hastily grabbed the dragging feet and he and Hap carried him into the office. In the glow of the overhead fluorescents their faces were cheesy-looking and revolted. Hap had forgotten about his insurance money.

The others looked into the car and then Hank turned away, one hand over his mouth, little finger sticking off like a man who has just raised his wineglass to make a toast. He trotted to the north end of the station’s lot and let his supper come up.

Vic and Stu looked into the car for some time, looked at each other, and then looked back in. On the passenger side was a young woman, her shift dress hiked up high on her thighs. Leaning against her was a boy or girl, about three years old. They were both dead. Their necks had swelled up like inner tubes and the flesh there was a purple-black color, like a bruise. The flesh was puffed up under their eyes, too. They looked, Vic later said, like those baseball players who put lampblack under their eyes to cut the glare. Their eyes bulged sightlessly. The woman was holding the child’s hand. Thick mucus had run from their noses and was now clotted there. Flies buzzed around them; lighting in the mucus, crawling in and out of their open mouths. Stu had been in the war, but he had never seen anything so terribly pitiful as this. His eyes were constantly drawn back to those linked hands.

He and Vic backed away together and looked blankly at each other. Then they turned to the station. They could see Hap, jawing frantically into the pay phone. Norm was walking toward the station behind them, throwing glances at the wreck over his shoulder. The Chevy’s driver’s side door stood sadly open. There was a pair of baby shoes dangling from the rearview mirror.

Hank was standing by the door, rubbing his mouth with a dirty handkerchief. “Jesus, Stu,” he said unhappily, and Stu nodded.

Hap hung up the phone. The Chevy’s driver was lying on the floor. “Ambulance will be here in ten minutes. Do you figure they’re—?” He jerked his thumb at the Chevy.

“They’re dead, okay.” Vic nodded. His lined face was yellow-pale, and he was sprinkling tobacco all over the floor as he tried to make one of his shitty-smelling cigarettes. “They’re the two deadest people I’ve ever seen.” He looked at Stu and Stu nodded, putting his hands in his pockets. He had the butterflies.

The man on the floor moaned thickly in his throat and they all looked down at him. After a moment, when it became obvious that the man was speaking or trying very hard to speak, Hap knelt beside him. It was, after all, his station.

Whatever had been wrong with the woman and child in the car was also wrong with this man. His nose was running freely, and his respiration had a peculiar undersea sound, a churning from somewhere in his chest. The flesh beneath his eyes was puffing, not black yet, but a bruised purple. His neck looked too thick, and the flesh had pushed up in a column to give him two extra chins. He was running a high fever; being close to him was like squatting on the edge of an open barbecue pit where good coals have been laid.

“The dog,” he muttered. “Did you put him out?”

“Mister,” Hap said, shaking him gently. “I called the ambulance. You’re going to be all right.”

“Clock went red,” the man on the floor grunted, and then began to cough, racking chainlike explosions that sent heavy mucus spraying from his mouth in long and ropy splatters. Hap leaned backward, grimacing desperately.

“Better roll him over,” Vic said. “He’s goan choke on it.”

But before they could, the coughing tapered off into bellowsed, uneven breathing again. His eyes blinked slowly and he looked at the men gathered above him.

“Where’s… this?”

“Arnette,” Hap said. “Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco. You crashed out some of my pumps.” And then, hastily, he added: “That’s okay. They was insured.”

The man on the floor tried to sit up and was unable. He had to settle for putting a hand on Hap’s arm.

“My wife… my little girl…”

“They’re fine,” Hap said, grinning a foolish dog grin.

“Seems like I’m awful sick,” the man said. Breath came in and out of him in a thick, soft roar. “They, were sick, too. Since we got up two days ago. Salt Lake City…” His eyes flickered slowly closed. “Sick… guess we didn’t move quick enough after all…”

Far off but getting closer, they could hear the whoop of the Arnette Volunteer Ambulance.

“Man,” Tommy Wannamaker said. “Oh man.”

The sick man’s eyes fluttered open again, and now they were filled with an intense, sharp concern. He struggled again to sit up. Sweat ran down his face. He grabbed Hap.

“Are Sally and Baby LaVon all right?” he demanded. Spittle flew from his lips and Hap could feel the man’s burning heat radiating outward. The man was sick, half crazy, he stank. Hap was reminded of the smell an old dog blanket gets sometimes.

“They’re all right,” he insisted, a little frantically. “You just… lay down and take it easy, okay?”

The man lay back down. His breathing was rougher now. Hap and Hank helped roll him over on his side, and his respiration seemed to ease a trifle. “I felt pretty good until last night,” he said. “Coughing, but all right. Woke up with it in the night. Didn’t get away quick enough. Is Baby LaVon okay?”

The last trailed off into something none of them could make out. The ambulance siren warbled closer and closer. Stu went over to the window to watch for it. The others remained in a circle around the man on the floor.

“What’s he got, Vic, any idea?” Hap asked.

Vic shook his head. “Dunno.”

“Might have been something they ate,” Norm Bruett said. “That car’s got a California plate. They was probably eatin at a lot of roadside stands, you know. Maybe they got a poison hamburger. It happens.”

The ambulance pulled in and skirted the wrecked Chevy to stop between it and the station door. The red light on top made crazy sweeping circles. It was full dark now.

“Gimme your hand and I’ll pull you up outta there!” the man on the floor cried suddenly, and then was silent.

“Food poisoning,” Vic said. “Yeah, that could be. I hope so, because—”

“Because what?” Hank asked.

“Because otherwise it might be something catching.” Vic looked at them with troubled eyes. “I seen cholera back in 1958, down near Nogales, and it looked something like this.”

Three men came in, wheeling a stretcher. “Hap,” one of them said. “You’re lucky you didn’t get your scraggy ass blown to kingdom come. This guy, huh?”

They broke apart to let them through—Billy Verecker, Monty Sullivan, Carlos Ortega, men they all knew.

“There’s two folks in that car,” Hap said, drawing Monty aside. “Woman and a little girl. Both dead.”

“Holy crow! You sure?”

“Yeah. This guy, he don’t know. You going to take him to Braintree?”

“I guess.” Monty looked at him, bewildered. “What do I do with the two in the car? I don’t know how to handle this, Hap.”

“Stu can call the State Patrol. You mind if I ride in with you?”

“Hell no.”

They got the man onto the stretcher, and while they ran him out, Hap went over to Stu. “I’m gonna ride into Braintree with that guy. Would you call the State Patrol?”

“Sure.”

“And Mary, too. Call and tell her what happened.”

“Okay.”

Hap trotted out to the ambulance and climbed in. Billy Verecker shut the doors behind him and then called the other two. They had been staring into the wrecked Chevy with dread fascination.

A few moments later the ambulance pulled out, siren warbling, red domelight pulsing blood-shadows across the gas station’s tarmac. Stu went to the phone and put a quarter in.

The man from the Chevy died twenty miles from the hospital. He drew one final bubbling gasp, let it out, hitched in a smaller one, and just quit.

Hap got the man’s wallet out of his hip pocket and looked at it. There were seventeen dollars in cash. A California driver’s license identified him as Charles D. Campion. There was an army card, and pictures of his wife and daughter encased in plastic. Hap didn’t want to look at the pictures.

He stuffed the wallet back into the dead man’s pocket and told Carlos to turn off the siren. It was ten after nine.

Chapter 2

There was a long rock pier running out into the Atlantic Ocean from the Ogunquit, Maine, town beach. Today it reminded her of an accusatory gray finger, and when Frannie Goldsmith parked her car in the public lot, she could see Jess sitting out at the end of it, just a silhouette in the afternoon sunlight. Gulls wheeled and cried above him, a New England portrait drawn in real life, and she doubted if any gull would dare spoil it by dropping a splat of white doodoo on Jess Rider’s immaculate blue chambray workshirt. After all, he was a practicing poet.

She knew it was Jess because his ten-speed was bolted to the iron railing that ran behind the parking attendant’s building. Gus, a balding, paunchy town fixture, was coming out to meet her. The fee for visitors was a dollar a car, but he knew Frannie lived in town without bothering to look at the RESIDENT sticker on the corner of her Volvo’s windshield. Fran came here a lot.

Sure I do, Fran thought. In fact, I got pregnant right down there on the beach, just about twelve feet above the high tide line. Dear Lump: You were conceived on the scenic coast of Maine, twelve feet above the high tide line and twenty yards east of the seawall. X marks the spot.

Gus raised his hand toward her, making a peace sign.

“Your fella’s out on the end of the pier, Miss Goldsmith.”

“Thanks, Gus. How’s business?”

He waved smilingly at the parking lot. There were maybe two dozen cars in all, and she could see blue and white RESIDENT stickers on most of them.

“Not much trade this early,” he said. It was June 17. “Wait two weeks and we’ll make the town some money.”

“I’ll bet. If you don’t embezzle it all.”

Gus laughed and went back inside.

Frannie leaned one hand against the warm metal of her car, took off her sneakers, and put on a pair of rubber thongs. She was a tall girl with chestnut hair that fell halfway down the back of the buff-colored shift she was wearing. Good figure. Long legs that got appreciative glances. Prime stuff was the correct frathouse term, she believed. Looky-looky-looky-here-comes-nooky. Miss College Girl, 1990.

Then she had to laugh at herself, and the laugh was a trifle bitter. You are carrying on, she told herself, as if this was the news of the world. Chapter Six: Hester Prynne Brings the News of Pearl’s Impending Arrival to Rev. Dimmesdale. Dimmesdale he wasn’t. He was Jess Rider, age twenty, one year younger than Our Heroine, Little Fran. He was a practicing college-student-undergraduate-poet. You could tell by his immaculate blue chambray workshirt.

She paused at the edge of the sand, feeling the good heat baking the soles of her feet even through the rubber thongs. The silhouette at the far end of the pier was still tossing small rocks into the water. Her thought was partly amusing but mostly dismaying. He knows what he looks like out there, she thought. Lord Byron, lonely but unafraid. Sitting in lonely solitude and surveying the sea which leads back, back to where England lies. But I, an exile, may never—

Oh balls!

It wasn’t so much the thought that disturbed her as what it indicated about her own state of mind. The young man she assumed she loved was sitting out there, and she was standing here caricaturing him behind his back.

She began to walk out along the pier, picking her way with careful grace over the rocks and crevices. It was an old pier, once part of a breakwater. Now most of the boats tied up on the southern end of town, where there were three marinas and seven honky-tonk motels that boomed all summer long.

She walked slowly, trying her best to cope with the thought that she might have fallen out of love with him in the space of the eleven days that she had known she was “a little bit preggers,” in the words of Amy Lauder. Well, he had gotten her into that condition, hadn’t he?

But not alone, that was for sure. And she had been on the pill. That had been the simplest thing in the world. She’d gone to the campus infirmary, told the doctor she was having painful menstruation and all sorts of embarrassing eructations on her skin, and the doctor had written her a prescription. In fact, he had given her a month of freebies.

She stopped again, out over the water now, the waves beginning to break toward the beach on her right and left. It occurred to her that the infirmary doctors probably heard about painful menstruation and too many pimples about as often as druggists heard about how I gotta buy these condoms for my brother—even more often in this day and age. She could just as easily have gone to him and said: “Gimme the pill. I’m gonna fuck.” She was of age. Why be coy? She looked at Jesse’s back and sighed. Because coyness gets to be a way of life. She began to walk again.

Anyway, the pill hadn’t worked. Somebody in the quality control department at the jolly old Ovril factory had been asleep at the switch. Either that or she had forgotten a pill and then had forgotten she’d forgotten.

She walked softly up behind him and laid both hands on his shoulders.

Jess, who had been holding his rocks in his left hand and plunking them into Mother Atlantic with his right, let out a scream and lurched to his feet. Pebbles scattered everywhere, and he almost knocked Frannie off the side and into the water. He almost went in himself, head first.

She started to giggle helplessly and backed away with her hands over her mouth as he turned furiously around, a well-built young man with black hair, gold-rimmed glasses, and regular features which, to Jess’s eternal discomfort, would never quite reflect the sensitivity inside him.

“You scared the hell out of me!” he roared.

“Oh Jess,” she giggled, “oh Jess, I’m sorry, but that was funny, it really was.”

“We almost fell in the water,” he said, taking a resentful step toward her.

She took a step backward to compensate, tripped over a rock, and sat down hard. Her jaws clicked together hard with her tongue between them—exquisite pain!—and she stopped giggling as if the sound had been cut off with a knife. The very fact of her sudden silence—you turn me off, I’m a radio—seemed funniest of all and she began to giggle again, in spite of the fact that her tongue was bleeding and tears of pain were streaming from her eyes.

“Are you okay, Frannie?” He knelt beside her, concerned.

I do love him, she thought with some relief. Good thing for me.

“Did you hurt yourself, Fran?”

“Only my pride,” she said, letting him help her up. “And I bit my tongue. See?” She ran it out for him, expecting to get a smile as a reward, but he frowned.

“Jesus, Fran, you’re really bleeding.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and looked at it doubtfully. Then he put it back. The image of the two of them walking hand in hand back to the parking lot came to her, young lovers under a summer sun, her with his handkerchief stuffed in her mouth. She raises her hand to the smiling, benevolent attendant and says: Hung-huh-Guth.

She began to giggle again, even though her tongue did hurt and there was a bloody taste in her mouth that was a little nauseating.

“Look the other way,” she said primly. “I’m going to be unladylike.”

Smiling a little, he theatrically covered his eyes. Propped on one arm, she stuck her head off the side of the pier and spat—bright red. Uck. Again. And again. At last her mouth seemed to clear and she looked around to see him peeking through his fingers.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m such an asshole.”

“No,” Jesse said, obviously meaning yes.

“Could we go get ice cream?” she asked. “You drive. I’ll buy.”

“That’s a deal.” He got to his feet and helped her up. She spat over the side again. Bright red.

Apprehensively, Fran asked him: “I didn’t bite any of it off, did I?”

“I don’t know,” Jess answered pleasantly. “Did you swallow a lump?”

She put a revolted hand to her mouth. “That’s not funny.”

“No. I’m sorry. You just bit it, Frannie.”

“Are there any arteries in a person’s tongue?”

They were walking back along the pier now, hand in hand. She paused every now and then to spit over the side. Bright red. She wasn’t going to swallow any of that stuff, uh-uh, no way.

“Nope.”

“Good.” She squeezed his hand and smiled at him reassuringly. “I’m pregnant.”

“Really? That’s good. Do you know who I saw in Port—”

He stopped and looked at her, his face suddenly inflexible and very, very careful. It broke her heart a little to see the wariness there.

“What did you say?”

“I’m pregnant.” She smiled at him brightly and then spat over the side of the pier. Bright red.

“Big joke, Frannie,” he said uncertainly.

“No joke.”

He kept looking at her. After a while they started walking again. As they crossed the parking lot, Gus came out and waved to them. Frannie waved back. So did Jess.

They stopped at the Dairy Queen on US 1. Jess got a Coke and sat sipping it thoughtfully behind the Volvo’s wheel. Fran made him get her a Banana Boat Supreme and she sat against her door, two feet of seat between them, spooning up nuts and pineapple sauce and ersatz Dairy Queen ice cream.

“You know,” she said, “D.Q. ice cream is mostly bubbles. Did you know that? Lots of people don’t.”

Jess looked at her and said nothing.

“Truth,” she said. “Those ice cream machines are really nothing but giant bubble machines. That’s how Dairy Queen can sell their ice cream so cheap. We had an offprint about it in Business Theory. There are many ways to defur a feline.”

Jess looked at her and said nothing.

“Now if you want real ice cream, you have to go to some place like a Deering Ice Cream Shop, and that’s—”

She burst into tears.

He slid across the seat to her and put his arms around her neck. “Frannie, don’t do that. Please.”

“My Banana Boat is dripping on me,” she said, still weeping.

His handkerchief came out again and he mopped her off. By then her tears had trailed off to sniffles.

“Banana Boat Supreme with Blood Sauce,” she said, looking at him with red eyes. “I guess I can’t eat any more. I’m sorry, Jess. Would you throw it away?”

“Sure,” he said stiffly.

He took it from her, got out, and tossed it in the waste can. He was walking funny, Fran thought, as if he had been hit hard down low where it hurts boys. In a way she supposed that was just where he had been hit. But if you wanted to look at it another way, well, that was just about the way she had walked after he had taken her virginity on the beach. She had felt like she had a bad case of diaper rash. Only diaper rash didn’t make you preggers.

He came back and got in.

“Are you really, Fran?” he asked abruptly.

“I am really.”

“How did—it happen? I thought you were on the pill.”

“Well, what I figure is one, somebody in the quality control department of the jolly old Ovril factory was asleep at the switch when my batch of pills went by on the conveyor belt, or two, they are feeding you boys something in the UNH messhall that builds up sperm, or three, I forgot to take a pill and have since forgotten that I forgot.”

She offered him a hard, thin, sunny smile that he recoiled from just a bit.

“What are you mad about, Fran? I just asked.”

“Well, to answer your question in a different way, on a warm night in April, it must have been the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth, you put your penis into my vagina and had an orgasm, thus ejaculating sperm by the millions—”

“Stop it,” he said sharply. “You don’t have to—”

“To what?” Outwardly stony, she was dismayed inside. In all her imaginings of how the scene might play, she had never seen it quite like this.

“To be so mad,” he said lamely. “I’m not going to run out on you.”

“No,” she said more softly. At this point she could have plucked one of his hands off the wheel, held it, and healed the breach entirely. But she couldn’t make herself do it. He had no business wanting to be comforted, no matter how tacit or unconscious his wanting was. She suddenly realized that one way or another, the laughs and the good times were over for a while. That made her want to cry again and she staved the tears off grimly. She was Frannie Goldsmith, Peter Goldsmith’s daughter, and she wasn’t going to sit in the parking lot of the Ogunquit Dairy Queen crying her damn stupid eyes out.

“What do you want to do?” Jess asked, getting out his cigarettes.

“What do you want to do?”

He struck a light and for just a moment as cigarette smoke raftered up she clearly saw a man and a boy fighting for control of the same face.

“Oh hell,” he said.

“The choices as I see them,” she said. “We can get married and keep the baby. We can get married and give the baby up. Or we don’t get married and I keep the baby. Or—”

“Frannie —”

“Or we don’t get married and I don’t keep the baby. Or I could get an abortion. Does that cover everything? Have I left anything out?”

“Frannie, can’t we just talk—”

“We are talking!” she flashed at him. “You had your chance and you said ‘Oh hell.’ Your exact words. I have just outlined all of the possible choices. Of course I’ve had a little more time to work up an agenda.”

“You want a cigarette?”

“No. They’re bad for the baby.”

“Frannie, goddammit!”

“Why are you shouting?” she asked softly.

“Because you seem determined to aggravate me as much as you can,” Jess said hotly. He controlled himself. “I’m sorry. I just can’t think of this as my fault.”

“You can’t?” She looked at him with a cocked eyebrow. “And behold, a virgin shall conceive.”

“Do you have to be so goddam flip? You had the pill, you said. I took you at your word. Was I so wrong?”

“No. You weren’t so wrong. But that doesn’t change the fact.”

“I guess not,” he said gloomily, and pitched his cigarette out half-smoked.

“So what do we do?”

“You keep asking me, Jesse. I just outlined the choices as I see them. I thought you might have some ideas. There’s suicide, but I’m not considering it at this point. So pick the other choice you like and we’ll talk about it.”

“Let’s get married,” he said in a sudden strong voice. He had the air of a man who has decided that the best way to solve the Gordian knot problem would be to hack right down through the middle of it. Full speed ahead and get the whiners below decks.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to marry you.”

It was as if his face was held together by a number of unseen bolts and each of them had suddenly been loosened a turn and a half. Everything sagged at once. The image was so cruelly comical that she had to rub her wounded tongue against the rough top of her mouth to keep from getting the giggles again. She didn’t want to laugh at Jess.

“Why not?” he asked. “Fran—”

“I have to think of my reasons why not. I’m not going to let you draw me into a discussion of my reasons why not, because right now I don’t know.”

“You don’t love me,” he said sulkily.

“In most cases, love and marriage are mutually exclusive states. Pick another choice.”

He was silent for a long time. He fiddled with a fresh cigarette but didn’t light it. At last he said: “I can’t pick another choice, Frannie, because you don’t want to discuss this. You want to score points off me.”

That touched her a little bit. She nodded. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve had a few scored off me in the last couple of weeks. Now you, Jess, you’re Joe College all the way. If a mugger came at you with a knife, you’d want to convene a seminar on the spot.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“Pick another choice.”

“No. You’ve got your reasons all figured out. Maybe I need a little time to think, too.”

“Okay. Would you take us back to the parking lot? I’ll drop you off and do some errands.”

He gazed at her, startled. “Frannie, I rode my bike all the way down from Portland. I’ve got a room at a motel outside of town. I thought we were going to spend the weekend together.”

“In your motel room. No, Jess. The situation has changed. You just get back on your ten-speed and bike back to Portland and you get in touch when you’ve thought about it a little more. No great hurry.”

“Stop riding me, Frannie.”

“No, Jess, you were the one who rode me,” she jeered in sudden, furious anger, and that was when he slapped her lightly backhand on the cheek.

He stared at her, stunned.

“I’m sorry, Fran.”

“Accepted,” she said colorlessly. “Drive on.”

They didn’t talk on the ride back to the public beach parking lot. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, watching the slices of ocean layered between the cottages just west of the seawall. They looked like slum apartments, she thought. Who owned these houses, most of them still shuttered blindly against the summer that would begin officially in less than a week? Professors from MIT. Boston doctors. New York lawyers. These houses weren’t the real biggies, the coast estates owned by men who counted their fortunes in seven and eight figures. But when the families who owned them moved in here, the lowest IQ on Shore Road would be Gus the parking attendant. The kids would have ten-speeds like Jess’s. They would have bored expressions and they would go with their parents to have lobster dinners and to attend the Ogunquit Playhouse. They would idle up and down the main street, masquerading after soft summer twilight as street people. She kept looking out at the lovely flashes of cobalt between the crammed-together houses, aware that the vision was blurring with a new film of tears. The little white cloud that cried.

They reached the parking lot, and Gus waved. They waved back.

“I’m sorry I hit you, Frannie,” Jess said in a subdued voice. “I never meant to do that.”

“I know. Are you going back to Portland?”

“I’ll stay here tonight and call you in the morning. But it’s your decision, Fran. If you decide, you know, that an abortion is the thing, I’ll scrape up the cash.”

“Pun intended?”

“No,” he said. “Not at all.” He slid across the seat and kissed her chastely.

“I love you, Fran.”

I don’t believe you do, she thought. Suddenly I don’t believe it at all… but I’ll accept in good grace. I can do that much.

“All right,” she said quietly.

“It’s the Lighthouse Motel. Call if you want.”

“Okay.” She slid behind the wheel, suddenly feeling very tired. Her tongue ached miserably where she had bitten it.

He walked to where his bike was locked to the iron railing and coasted it back to her. “Wish you’d call, Fran.”

She smiled artificially. “We’ll see. So long, Jess.”

She put the Volvo in gear, turned around, and drove across the lot to the Shore Road. She could see Jess standing by his bike yet, the ocean at his back, and for the second time that day she mentally accused him of knowing exactly what kind of picture he was making. This time, instead of being irritated, she felt a little bit sad. She drove on, wondering if the ocean would ever look the way it had looked to her before all of this had happened. Her tongue hurt miserably. She opened her window wider and spat. All white and all right this time. She could smell the salt of the ocean strongly, like bitter tears.

Chapter 3

Norm Bruett woke up at quarter past ten in the morning to the sound of kills fighting outside the bedroom window and country music from the radio in the kitchen.

He went to the back door in his saggy shorts and undershirt, threw it open, and yelled: “You kids shutcha heads!”

A moment’s pause. Luke and Bobby looked around from the old and rusty dump truck they had been arguing over. As always when he saw his kids, Norm felt dragged two ways at once. His heart ached to see them wearing hand-me-downs and Salvation Army giveouts like the ones you saw the nigger children in east Arnette wearing; and at the same time a horrible, shaking anger would sweep through him, making him want to stride out there and beat the living shit out of them.

“Yes, Daddy,” Luke said in a subdued way. He was nine.

“Yes, Daddy,” Bobby echoed. He was seven going on eight. Norm stood for a moment, glaring at them, and slammed the door shut. He stood for a moment, looking indecisively at the pile of clothes he had worn yesterday. They were lying at the foot of the sagging double bed where he had dropped them.

That slutty bitch, he thought. She didn’t even hang up my duds.

“Lila!” he bawled.

There was no answer. He considered ripping the door open again and asking Luke where the hell she had gone. It wasn’t donated commodities day until next week and if she was down at the employment office in Braintree again she was an even bigger fool than he thought.

He didn’t bother to ask the kids. He felt tired and he had a queasy, thumping headache. Felt like a hangover, but he’d only had three beers down at Hap’s the night before. That accident had been a hell of a thing. The woman and the baby dead in the car, the man, Campion, dying on the way to the hospital. By the time Hap had gotten back, the State patrol had come and gone, and the wrecker, and the Braintree undertaker’s hack. Vic Palfrey had given the Laws a statement for all five of them. The undertaker, who was also the county coroner, refused to speculate on what might have hit them.

“But it ain’t cholera. And don’t you go scarin people sayin it is. There’ll be an autopsy and you can read about it in the paper.”

Miserable little pissant, Norm thought, slowly dressing himself in yesterday’s clothes. His headache was turning into a real blinder. Those kids had better be quiet or they were going to have a pair of broken arms to mouth off about. Why the hell couldn’t they have school the whole year round?

He considered tucking his shirt into his pants, decided the President probably wouldn’t be stopping by that day, and shuffled out into the kitchen in his sock feet. The bright sunlight coming in the east windows made him squint.

The cracked Philco radio over the stove sang:

But bay-yay-yaby you can tell me if anyone can,

Baby, can you dig your man?

He’s a righteous man,

Tell me baby, can you dig your man?

Things had come to a pretty pass when they had to play nigger rock and roll music like that on the local country music station. Norm turned it off before it could split his head. There was a note by the radio and he picked it up, narrowing his eyes to read it.

Dear Norm,

Sally Hodges says she needs somebody to sit her kids this morning and says shell give me a dolar. Ill be back for luntch. Theres sassage if you want it. I love you honey.

Lila.

Norm put the note back and just stood there for a moment, thinking it over and trying to get the sense of it in his mind. It was goddam hard to think past the headache. Babysitting… a dollar. For Ralph Hodges’s wife.

The three elements slowly came together in his mind. Lila had gone off to sit Sally Hodges’s three kids to earn a lousy dollar and had stuck him with Luke and Bobby. By God it was hard times when a man had to sit home and wipe his kids’ noses so his wife could go and scratch out a lousy buck that wouldn’t even buy them a gallon of gas. That was hard fucking times.

Dull anger came to him, making his head ache even worse. He shuffled slowly to the Frigidaire, bought when he had been making good overtime, and opened it. Most of the shelves were empty, except for leftovers Lila had put up in refrigerator dishes. He hated those little plastic Tupperware dishes. Old beans, old corn, a leftover dab of chili… nothing a man liked to eat. Nothing in there but little Tupperware dishes and three little old sausages done up in Handi-Wrap. He bent, looking at them, the familiar helpless anger now compounded by the dull throb in his head. Those sausages looked like somebody had cut the cocks off’n three of those pygmies they had down in Africa or South America or wherever the fuck it was they had them. He didn’t feel like eating anyway. He felt damn sick, when you got right down to it.

He went over to the stove, scratched a match on the piece of sandpaper nailed to the wall beside it, lit the front gas ring, and put on the coffee. Then he sat down and waited dully for it to boil. Just before it did, he had to scramble his snotrag out of his back pocket to catch a big wet sneeze. Coming down with a cold, he thought. Isn’t that something nice on top of everything else? But it never occurred to him to think of the phlegm that had been running out of that fellow Campion’s pump the night before.

Hap was in the garage bay putting a new tailpipe on Tony Leominster’s Scout and Vic Palfrey was rocking back on a folding camp chair, watching him and drinking a Dr. Pepper when the bell dinged out front.

Vic squinted. “It’s the State Patrol,” he said. “Looks like your cousin, there. Joe Bob.”

“Okay.”

Hap came out from beneath the Scout, wiping his hands on a ball of waste. On his way through the office he sneezed heavily. He hated summer colds. They were the worst.

Joe Bob Brentwood, who was almost six and a half feet tall, was standing by the back of his cruiser, filling up. Beyond him, the three pumps Campion had driven over the night before were neatly lined up like dead soldiers.

“Hey Joe Bob!” Hap said, coming out.

“Hap, you sumbitch,” Joe Bob said, putting the pump handle on automatic and stepping over the hose. “You lucky this place still standin this morning.”

“Shit, Stu Redman saw the guy coming and switched off the pumps. There was a load of sparks, though.”

“Still damn lucky. Listen, Hap, I come over for somethin besides a fill-up.”

“Yeah?”

Joe Bob’s eyes went to Vic, who was standing in the station door. “Was that old geezer here last night?”

“Who? Vic? Yeah, he comes over most every night.”

“Can he keep his mouth shut?”

“Sure, I reckon. He’s a good enough old boy.”

The automatic feed kicked off. Hap squeezed off another twenty cents worth, then put the nozzle back on the pump and switched it off. He walked back to Joe Bob.

“So? What’s the story?”

“Well, let’s go inside. I guess the old fella ought to hear, too. And if you get a chance, you can phone the rest of them that was here.”

They walked across the tarmac and into the office.

“A good mornin to you, Officer,” Vic said.

Joe Bob nodded.

“Coffee, Joe Bob?” Hap asked.

“I guess not.” He looked at them heavily. “Thing is, I don’t know how my superiors would like me bein here at all. I don’t think they would. So when those guys come here, you don’t let them know I tipped you, right?”

“What guys, Officer?” Vic asked.

“Health Department guys,” Joe Bob said.

Vic said, “Oh Jesus, it was cholera. I knowed it was.”

Hap looked from one to the other. “Joe Bob?”

“I don’t know nothing,” Joe Bob said, sitting down in one of the plastic Woolco chairs. His bony knees came nearly up to his neck. He took a pack of Chesterfields from his blouse pocket and lit up. “Finnegan, there, the coroner—”

“That was a smartass,” Hap said fiercely. “You should have seen him struttin around in here, Joe Bob. Just like a pea turkey that got its first hardon. Shushin people and all that.”

“He’s a big turd in a little bowl, all right,” Joe Bob agreed. “Well, he got Dr. James to look at this Campion, and the two of them called in another doctor that I don’t know. Then they got on the phone to Houston. And around three this mornin they come into that little airport outside of Braintree.”

“Who did?”

“Pathologists. Three of them. They were in there with the bodies until about eight o’clock. Cuttin on em is my guess, although I dunno for sure. Then they got on the phone to the Plague Center in Atlanta, and those guys are going to be here this afternoon. But they said in the meantime that the State Health Department was to send some fellas out here and see all the guys that were in the station last night, and the guys that drove the rescue unit to Braintree. I dunno, but it sounds to me like they want you quarantined.”

“Moses in the bulrushes,” Hap said, frightened.

“The Atlanta Plague Center’s federal,” Vic said. “Would they send out a planeload of federal men just for cholera?”

“Search me,” Joe Bob said. “But I thought you guys had a right to know. From all I heard, you just tried to lend a hand.”

“It’s appreciated, Joe Bob,” Hap said slowly. “What did James and this other doctor say?”

“Not much. But they looked scared. I never seen doctors look scared like that. I didn’t much care for it.”

A heavy silence fell. Joe Bob went to the drink machine and got a bottle of Fresca. The faint hissing sound of carbonation was audible as he popped the cap. As Joe Bob sat down again, Hap took a Kleenex from the box next to the cash register, wiped his runny nose, and folded it into the pocket of his greasy overall.

“What have you found out about Campion?” Vic asked. “Anything?”

“We’re still checking,” Joe Bob said with a trace of importance. “His ID says he was from San Diego, but a lot of the stuff in his wallet was two and three years out of date. His driver’s license was expired. He had a BankAmericard that was issued in 1986 and that was expired, too. He had an army card so we’re checking with them. The captain has a hunch that Campion hadn’t lived in San Diego for maybe four years.”

“AWOL?” Vic asked. He produced a big red bandanna, hawked, and spat into it.

“Dunno yet. But his army card said he was in until 1997, and he was in civvies, and he was with his family, and he was a fuck of a long way from California, and listen to my mouth run.”

“Well, I’ll get in touch with the others and tell em what you said, anyway,” Hap said. “Much obliged.”

Joe Bob stood up. “Sure. Just keep my name out of it. I sure wouldn’t want to lose my job. Your buddies don’t need to know who tipped you, do they?”

“No,” Hap said, and Vic echoed it.

As Joe Bob went to the door, Hap said a little apologetically: “That’s five even for gas, Joe Bob. I hate to charge you, but with things the way they are—”

“That’s okay.” Joe Bob handed him a credit card. “State’s payin. And I got my credit slip to show why I was here.”

While Hap was filling out the slip he sneezed twice.

“You want to watch that,” Joe Bob said. “Nothin any worse than a summer cold.”

“Don’t I know it.”

Suddenly, from behind them, Vic said: “Maybe it ain’t a cold.”

They turned to him. Vic looked frightened.

“I woke up this morning sneezin and hackin away like sixty,” Vic said. “Had a mean headache, too. I took some aspirins and it’s gone back some, but I’m still full of snot. Maybe we’re coming down with it. What that Campion had. What he died of.”

Hap looked at him for a long time, and as he was about to put forward all his reasons why it couldn’t be, he sneezed again.

Joe Bob looked at them both gravely for a moment and then said, “You know, it might not be such a bad idea to close the station, Hap. Just for today.”

Hap looked at him, scared, and tried to remember what all his reasons had been. He couldn’t think of a one. All he could remember was that he had also awakened with a headache and a runny nose. Well, everyone caught a cold once in a while. But before that guy Campion had shown up, he had been fine. Just fine.

The three Hodges kids were six, four, and eighteen months. The two youngest were taking naps, and the oldest was out back digging a hole. Lila Bruett was in the living room, watching “The Young and the Restless.” She hoped Sally wouldn’t return until it was over. Ralph Hodges had bought a big color TV when times had been better in Arnette, and Lila loved to watch the afternoon stories in color. Everything was so much prettier.

She drew on her cigarette and then let the smoke out in spasms as a racking cough seized her. She went into the kitchen and spat the mouthful of crap she had brought up down the drain. She had gotten up wrath the cough, and all day it had felt like someone was tickling the back of her throat with a feather.

She went back to the living room after taking a peek out the pantry window to make sure Bert Hodges was okay. A commercial was on now, two dancing bottles of toilet bowl cleaner. Lila let her eyes drift around the room and wished her own house looked this nice. Sally’s hobby was doing paint-by-the-numbers pictures of Christ, and they were all over the living room in nice frames. She especially liked the big one of the Last Supper mounted in back of the TV; it had come with sixty different oil colors, Sally had told her, and it took almost three months to finish. It was a real work of art.

Just as her story came back on, Baby Cheryl started to cry, a whooping, ugly yell broken by bursts of coughing.

Lila put out her cigarette and hurried into the bedroom. Eva, the four-year-old, was still fast asleep, but Cheryl was lying on her back in her crib, and her face was going an alarming purple color. Her cries began to sound strangled.

Lila, who was not afraid of the croup after seeing both of her own through bouts with it, picked her up by the heels and swatted her firmly on the back. She had no idea if Dr. Spock recommended this sort of treatment or not, because she had never read him. It worked nicely on Baby Cheryl. She emitted a froggy croak and suddenly spat an amazing wad of yellow phlegm out onto the floor.

“Better?” Lila asked.

“Yeth,” said Baby Cheryl. She was almost asleep again.

Lila wiped up the mess with a Kleenex. She couldn’t remember ever having seen a baby cough up so much snot all at once.

She sat down in front of “The Young and the Restless” again, frowning. She lit another cigarette, sneezed over the first puff, and then began to cough herself.

Chapter 4

It was an hour past nightfall.

Starkey sat alone at a long table, sifting through sheets of yellow flimsy. Their contents dismayed him. He had been serving his country for thirty-six years, beginning as a scared West Point plebe. He had won medals. He had spoken with Presidents, had offered them advice, and on occasion his advice had been taken. He had been through dark moments before, plenty of them, but this…

He was scared, so deeply scared he hardly dared admit it to himself. It was the kind of fear that could drive you mad.

On impulse he got up and went to the wall where the five blank TV monitors looked into the room. As he got up, his knee bumped the table, causing one of the sheets of flimsy to fall off the edge. It seesawed lazily down through the mechanically purified air and landed on the tile, half in the table’s shadow and half out. Someone standing over it and looking down would have seen this:

OT CONFIRMED

SEEMS REASONABLY

STRAIN CODED 848-AB

CAMPION, (W.) SALLY

ANTIGEN SHIFT AND MUTATION.

HIGH RISK/EXCESS MORTALITY

AND COMMUNICABILITY ESTIMATED

REPEAT 99.4%. ATLANTA PLAGUE CENTER

UNDERSTANDS. TOP SECRET BLUE FOLDER.

ENDS

P-T-222312A

Starkey pushed a button under the middle screen and the picture flashed on with the unnerving suddenness of solid state components. It showed the western California desert, looking east. It was desolate, and the desolation was rendered eerie by the reddish-purple tinge of infrared photography.

It’s out there, straight ahead, Starkey thought. Project Blue.

The fright tried to wash over him again. He reached into his pocket and brought out a blue pill. What his daughter would call a “downer.” Names didn’t matter; results did. He dry-swallowed it, his hard, unseamed face wrinkling for a moment as it went down.

Project Blue.

He looked at the other blank monitors, and then punched up pictures on all of them. 4 and 5 showed labs. 4 was physics, 5 was viral biology. The vi-bi lab was full of animal cages, mostly for guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys, and a few dogs. None of them appeared to be sleeping. In the physics lab a small centrifuge was still turning around and around. Starkey had complained about that. He had complained bitterly. There was something spooky about that centrifuge whirling gaily around and around and around while Dr. Ezwick lay dead on the floor nearby, sprawled out like a scarecrow that had tipped over in a high wind.

They had explained to him that the centrifuge was on the same circuit as the lights, and if they turned off the centrifuge, the lights would go, too. And the cameras down there were not equipped for infrared. Starkey understood. Some more brass might come down from Washington and want to look at the dead Nobel Prize winner who was lying four hundred feet under the desert less than a mile away. If we turn off the centrifuge, we turn off the professor. Elementary. What his daughter would have called a “Catch-22.”

He took another “downer” and looked into monitor 2. This was the one he liked least of all. He didn’t like the man with his face in the soup. Suppose someone walked up to you and said: You will spend eternity with your phiz in a bowl of soup. It’s like the old pie-in-the-face routine: it stops being funny when it starts being you.

Monitor 2 showed the Project Blue cafeteria. The accident had occurred almost perfectly between shifts, and the cafeteria had been only lightly populated. He supposed it hadn’t mattered much to them, whether they had died in the cafeteria or in their bedrooms or their labs. Still, the man with his face in the soup…

A man and a woman in blue coveralls were crumpled at the foot of the candy machine. A man in a white coverall lay beside the Seeburg jukebox. At the tables themselves were nine men and fourteen women, some of them slumped beside Hostess Twinkies, some with spilled cups of Coke and Sprite still clutched in their stiff hands. And at the second table, near the end, there was a man who had been identified as Frank D. Bruce. His face was in a bowl of what appeared to be Campbell’s Chunky Sirloin Soup.

The first monitor showed only a digital clock. Until June 13, all the numbers on that clock had been green. Now they had turned bright red. They had stopped. The figures read 06:13:90:02:37:16.

June 13, 1990. Thirty-seven minutes past two in the morning. And sixteen seconds.

From behind him came a brief burring noise.

Starkey turned off the monitors one by one and then turned around. He saw the sheet of flimsy on the floor and put it back on the table.

“Come.”

It was Creighton. He looked grave and his skin was a slaty color. More bad news, Starkey thought serenely. Someone else has taken a long high dive into a cold bowl of Chunky Sirloin Soup.

“Hi, Len,” he said quietly.

Len Creighton nodded. “Billy. This… Christ, I don’t know how to tell you.”

“I think one word at a time might go best, soldier.”

“Those men who handled Campion’s body are through their prelims at Atlanta, and the news isn’t good.”

“All of them?”

“Five for sure. There’s one—his name is Stuart Redman—who’s negative so far. But as far as we can tell, Campion himself was negative for over fifty hours.”

“If only Campion hadn’t run,” Starkey said. “That was sloppy security, Len. Very sloppy.”

Creighton nodded.

“Go on.”

“Arnette has been quarantined. We’ve isolated at least sixteen cases of constantly shifting A-Prime flu there so far. And those are just the overt ones.”

“The news media?”

“So far, no problem. They believe it’s anthrax.”

“What else?”

“One very serious problem. We have a Texas highway patrolman named Joseph Robert Brentwood. His cousin owns the gas station where Campion ended up. He dropped by yesterday morning to tell Hapscomb the health people were coming. We picked him up three hours ago and he’s en route to Atlanta now. In the meantime he’s been patrolling half of East Texas. God knows how many people he’s been in contact with.”

“Oh, shit,” Starkey said, and was appalled by the watery weakness in his voice and the skin-crawl that had started near the base of his testicles sad was now working up into his belly. 99.4% communicability, he thought. It played insanely over and over in his mind. And that meant 99.4% excess mortality, because the human body couldn’t produce the antibodies necessary to stop a constantly shifting antigen virus. Every time the body did produce the right antibody, the virus simply shifted to a slightly new form. For the same reason a vaccine was going to be almost impossible to create.

99.4%.

“Christ,” he said. “That’s it?”

“Well—”

“Go on. Finish.”

Softly, then, Creighton said: “Hammer’s dead, Billy. Suicide. He shot himself in the eye with his service pistol. The Project Blue specs were on his desk. I guess he thought leaving them there was all the suicide note anybody would need.”

Starkey closed his eyes. Vic Hammer was… had been… his son-in-law. How was he supposed to tell Cynthia about this? I’m sorry, Cindy. Vic took a high dive into a cold bowl of soup today. Here, have a “downer.” You see, there was a goof. Somebody made a mistake with a box. Somebody else forgot to pull a switch that would have sealed off the base. The lag was only forty-some seconds, but it was enough. The box is known in the trade as a “sniffer.” It’s made in Portland, Oregon, Defense Department Contract 164480966. The boxes are put together in separate circuits by female technicians, and they do it that way so none of them really know what they’re doing. One of them was maybe thinking about what to make for supper, and whoever was supposed to check her work was maybe thinking about trading the family car. Anyway, Cindy, the last coincidence was that a man at the Number Four security post, a man named Campion, saw the numbers go red just in time to get out of the room before the doors shut and mag-locked. Then he got his family and ran. He drove through the main gate just four minutes before the sirens started going off and we sealed the whole base. And no one started looking for him until nearly an hour later because there are no monitors in the security posts—somewhere along the line you have to stop guarding the guardians or everyone in the world would be a goddam turnkey—and everybody just assumed he was in there, waiting for the sniffers to sort out the clean areas from the dirty ones. So he got him some running room and he was smart enough to use the ranch trails and lucky enough not to pick any of the ones where his car could get bogged down. Then someone had to make a command decision on whether or not to bring in the State Police, the FBI, or both of them and that fabled buck got passed hither, thither, and yon, and by the time someone decided the Shop ought to handle it, this happy asshole—this happy diseased asshole—had gotten to Texas, and when they finally caught him he wasn’t running anymore because he and his wife and his baby daughter were all laid out on cooling boards in some pissant little town called Braintree. Braintree, Texas. Anyway, Cindy, what I’m trying to say is that this was a chain of coincidence on the order of winning the Irish Sweepstakes. With a little incompetence thrown in for good luck—for bad luck, I mean, please excuse me—but mostly it was just a thing that happened. None of it was your man’s fault. But he was the head of the project, and he saw the situation start to escalate, and then

“Thanks, Len,” he said.

“Billy, would you like—”

“I’ll be up in ten minutes. I want you to schedule a general staff meeting fifteen minutes from now. If they’re in bed, kick em out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Len…”

“Yes?”

“I’m glad you were the one who told me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Creighton left. Starkey glanced at his watch, then walked over to the monitors set into the wall. He turned on 2, put his hands behind his back, and stared thoughtfully into Project Blue’s silent cafeteria.

Chapter 5

Larry Underwood pulled around the corner and found a parking space big enough for the Datsun Z between a fire hydrant and somebody’s trash can that had fallen into the litter. There was something unpleasant in the trash can and Larry tried to tell himself that he really hadn’t seen the Stiffening dead cat and the rat gnawing at its white-furred belly. The rat was gone so fast from the sweep of his headlights that it really might not have been there. The cat, however, was fixed in stasis. And, he supposed, killing the Z’s engine, if you believed in one you had to believe in the other. Didn’t they say that Paris had the biggest rat population in the world? All those old sewers. But New York did well, too. And if he remembered his misspent youth well enough, not all the rats in New York City went on four legs. And what the hell was he doing parked in front of this decaying brownstone, thinking about rats anyway?

Five days ago, on June 14, he had been in sunny Southern California, home of hopheads, freak religions, the only c/w nightclubs in the world with gogo dancers, and Disneyland. This morning at quarter of four he had arrived on the shore of the other ocean, paying his toll to go across the Triborough Bridge. A sullen drizzle had been falling. Only in New York can an early summer drizzle seem so unrepentantly sullen. Larry could see the drops accreting on the Z’s windshield now, as intimations of dawn began to creep into the eastern sky.

Dear New York: I’ve come home.

Maybe the Yankees were in town. That might make the trip worthwhile. Take the subway up to the Stadium, drink beer, eat hotdogs, and watch the Yankees wallop the piss out of Cleveland or Boston…

His thoughts drifted off and when he wandered back to them he saw that the light had gotten much stronger. The dashboard clock read 6:05. He had been dozing. The rat had been real, he saw. The rat was back. The rat had dug himself quite a hole in the dead cat’s guts. Larry’s empty stomach did a slow forward roll. He considered beeping the horn to scare it away for good, but the sleeping brownstones with their empty garbage cans standing sentinel duty daunted him.

He slouched lower in the bucket seat so he wouldn’t have to watch the rat eating breakfast. Just a bite, my good man, and then back to the subway system. Going out to Yankee Stadium this evening? Perhaps I’ll see you, old chum. Although I really doubt that you’ll see me.

The front of the building had been defaced with spray can slogans, cryptic and ominous: CHICO 116, ZORRO 93, LITTLE ABIE #1! When he had been a boy, before his father died, this had been a good neighborhood. Two stone dogs had guarded the steps leading up to the double doors. A year before he took off for the coast, vandals had demolished the one on the right from the forepaws up. Now they were both entirely gone, except for one rear paw of the left dog. The body it had been called into creation to support had entirely vanished, perhaps decorating some Puerto Rican junkie’s crash-pad. Maybe ZORRO 93 or LITTLE ABIE #1! had taken it. Maybe the rats had carried it away to some deserted subway tunnel one dark night. For all he knew, maybe they had taken his mother along, too. He supposed he should at least climb the steps and make sure her name was still there under the Apartment 15 mailbox, but he was too tired.

No, he would just sit here and nod off, trusting to the last residue of reds in his system to wake him up around seven. Then he would go see if his mother still lived here. Maybe it would be best if she was gone. Maybe then he wouldn’t even bother with the Yankees. Maybe he would just check into the Biltmore, sleep for three days, and then head back into the golden West. In this light, in this drizzle, with his legs and head still throbbing from the bringdown, New York had all the charm of a dead whore.

His mind began to drift away again, mulling over the last nine weeks or so, trying to find some sort of key that would snake everything clear and explain how you could butt yourself against stone walls for six long years, playing the clubs, making demo tapes, doing sessions, the whole bit, and then suddenly make it in nine weeks. Trying to get that straight in your mind was like trying to swallow a doorknob. There had to be an answer, he thought, an explanation that would allow him to reject the ugly notion that the whole thing had been a whim, a simple twist of fate, in Dylan’s words.

He dozed deeper, arms crossed on his chest, going over it and over it, and mixed up in all of it was this new thing, like a low and sinister counterpoint, one note at the threshold of audibility played on a synthesizer, heard in a migrainy sort of way that acted on you like a premonition: the rat, digging into the dead cat’s body, munch, munch, just looking for something tasty here. It’s the law of the jungle, my man, if you’re in the trees you got to swing…

It had really started eighteen months ago. He had been playing with the Tattered Remnants in a Berkeley club, and a man from Columbia had called. Not a biggie, just another toiler in the vinyl vineyards. Neil Diamond was thinking of recording one of his songs, a tune called “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”

Diamond was doing an album, all his own stuff except for an old Buddy Holly tune, “Peggy Sue Got Married”, and maybe this Larry Underwood tune. The question was, would Larry like to come up and cut a demo of the tune, then sit in an the session? Diamond wanted a second acoustic guitar—and he liked the tune a lot.

Larry said yes.

The session lasted three days. It was a good one. Larry met Neil Diamond, also Robbie Robertson, also Richard Perry. He got mention on the album’s inner sleeve and got paid union scale. But “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” never made the album. On the second evening of the session, Diamond had come up with a new tune of his own and that made the album instead.

Well, the man from Columbia said, that’s too bad. It happens. Tell you what—why don’t you cut the demo anyway. I’ll see if there’s anything I can do. So Larry cut the demo and then found himself back out on the street. In L.A. times were hard. There were a few sessions, but not many.

He finally got a job playing guitar in a supper club, crooning things like “Softly as I Leave You” and “Moon River” while elderly cats talked business and sucked up Italian food. He wrote the lyrics on scraps of notepaper, because otherwise he tended to mix them up or forget them altogether, chording the tune while he went “hmmmm-hmmmm, ta-da-hmmmm,” trying to look suave like Tony Bennett vamping and feeling like an asshole. In elevators and supermarkets he had become morbidly aware of the low Muzak that played constantly.

Then, nine weeks ago and out of the blue, the man from Columbia had called. They wanted to release his demo as a single. Could he come in and back it? Sure, Larry said. He could do that. So he had gone into Columbia’s L.A. studios on a Sunday afternoon, double-tracked his own voice on “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” in about an hour, and then backed it with a song he had written for the Tattered Remnants, “Pocket Savior.” The man from Columbia presented him with a check for five hundred dollars and a stinker of a contract that bound Larry to more than it did the record company. He shook Larry’s hand, told him it was good to have him aboard, offered him a small, pitying smile when Larry asked him how the single would be promoted, and then took his leave. It was too late to deposit the check, so Larry ran through his repertoire at Gino’s with it in his pocket. Near the end of his first set, he sang a subdued version of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” The only person who noticed was Gino’s proprietor, who told him to save the nigger bebop for the cleanup crew.

Seven weeks ago, the man from Columbia called again and told him to go get a copy of Billboard. Larry ran. “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” was one of three hot prospects for that week. Larry called the man from Columbia back, and he had asked Larry how he would like to lunch with some of the real biggies. To discuss the album. They were all pleased with the single, which was getting airplay in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Portland, Maine, already. It looked as if it was going to catch. It had won a late-night Battle of the Sounds contest for four nights running on one Detroit soul station. No one seemed to know that Larry Underwood was white.

He had gotten drunk at the luncheon and hardly noticed how his salmon tasted. No one seemed to mind that he had gotten loaded. One of the biggies said he wouldn’t be surprised to see “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” carry off a Grammy next year. It all rang gloriously in Larry’s ears. He felt like a man in a dream, and going back to his apartment he felt strangely sure that he would be hit by a truck and that would end it all. The Columbia biggies had presented him with another check, this one for $2,500. When he got home, Larry picked up the telephone and began to make calls. The first one was to Mort “Gino” Green. Larry told him he’d have to find someone else to play “Yellow Bird” while the customers ate his lousy undercooked pasta. Then he called everyone he could think of, including Barry Grieg the Remnants. Then he went out and got standing-up falling-down drunk.

Five weeks ago the single had cracked Billboard ’s Hot One Hundred. Number eighty-nine. With a bullet. That was the week spring had really come to Los Angeles, and on a bright and sparkling May afternoon, with the buildings so white and the ocean so blue that they could knock your eyes out and send them rolling down your cheeks like marbles, he had heard his record on the radio for the first time. Three or four friends were there, including his current girl, and they were moderately done up on cocaine. Larry was coming out of the kitchenette and into the living room with a bag of Toll House cookies when the familiar KLMT slogan—Nyoooooo… meee-USIC! —came on. And then Larry had been transfixed by the sound of his own voice coming out of the Technics speakers:

I know I didn’t say I was comin down,

I know you didn’t know I was here in town,

But bay-yay-yaby you can tell me if anyone can,

Baby, can you dig your man?

He’s a righteous man,

Tell me baby, can you dig your man?

“Jesus, that’s me,” he had said. He dropped the cookies onto the floor and then stood gape-mouthed and stone-flabbergasted as his friends applauded.

Four weeks ago his tune had jumped to seventy-three on the Billboard chart. He began to feel as if he had been pushed rudely into an old-time silent movie where everything was moving too fast. The phone rang off the hook. Columbia was screaming for the album, wanting to capitalize on the single’s success. Some crazy rat’s ass of an A & R man called three times in one day, telling him he had to get in to Record One, not now but yesterday, and record a remake of the McCoys’ “Hang On, Snoopy” as the follow-up. Monster! this moron kept shouting. Only follow-up that’s possible, Lar! (He had never met this guy and already he wasn’t even Larry but Lar.) It’ll be a monster! I mean a fucking monster!

Larry at last lost his patience and told the monster-shouter that, given a choice between recording “Hang On, Sloopy” and being tied down and receiving a Coca-Cola enema, he would pick the enema. Then he hung up.

The train kept rolling just the same. Assurances that this could be the biggest record in five years poured into his dazed ears. Agents called by the dozen. They all sounded hungry. He began to take uppers, and it seemed to him that he heard his song everywhere. One Saturday morning he heard it on “Soul Train” and spent the rest of the day trying to make himself believe that, yes, that had actually happened.

It became suddenly hard to separate himself from Julie, the girl he had been dating since his gig at Gino’s. She introduced him to all sorts of people, few of them people he really wanted to see. Her voice began to remind him of the prospective agents he heard over the telephone. In a long, loud, acrimonious argument, he split with her. She had screamed at him that his head would soon be too big to fit through a recording studio door, that he owed her five hundred dollars for dope, that he was the 1990s’ answer to Zagar and Evans. She had threatened to kill herself. Afterward Larry felt as if he had been through a long pillow-fight in which all the pillows had been treated with a low-grade poison gas.

They had begun cutting the album three weeks ago, and Larry had withstood most of the “for your own good” suggestions. He used what leeway the contract gave him. He got three of the Tattered Remnants—Barry Grieg, Al Spellman, and Johnny McCall—and two other musicians he had worked with in the past, Neil Goodman and Wayne Stukey. They cut the album in nine days, absolutely all the studio time they could get. Columbia seemed to want an album based on what they thought would be a twenty-week career, beginning with “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” and ending with “Hang On, Sloopy.” Larry wanted more.

The album cover was a photo of Larry in an old-fashioned clawfoot tub full of suds. Written on the tiles above him in a Columbia secretary’s lipstick were the words POCKET SAVIOR and LARRY UNDERWOOD. Columbia had wanted to call the album Baby, Can You Dig Your Man? but Larry absolutely balked, and they had finally settled for a CONTAINS THE HIT SINGLE sticker on the shrink-wrap.

Two weeks ago the single hit number forty-seven, and the party had started. He had rented a Malibu beachhouse for a month, and after that things got a little hazy. People wandered in and out, always more of them. He knew some, but mostly they were strangers. He could remember being huckstered by even more agents who wanted to “further his great career.” He could remember a girl who had bum-tripped and gone screaming down the bone-white beach as naked as a nuthatch. He could remember snorting coke and chasing it with tequila. He could remember being shaken awake on Saturday morning, it must have been a week or so ago, to hear Kasey Kasem spin his record as a debut song at number thirty-six on “American Top Forty.” He could remember taking a great many reds and, vaguely, dickering for the Datsun Z with a four-thousand-dollar royalty check that had come in the mail.

And then it was June 13, six days ago, the day Wayne Stukey asked Larry to go for a walk with him down the beach. It had only been nine in the morning but the stereo was on, both TVs, and it sounded like an orgy was going on in the basement playroom. Larry had been sitting in an overstuffed living room chair, wearing only underpants, and trying owlishly to get the sense from a Superboy comic book. He felt very alert, but none of the words seemed to connect to anything. There was no gestalt. A Wagner piece was thundering from the quad speakers, and Wayne had to shout three or four times to make himself understood. Then Larry nodded. He felt as if he could walk for miles.

But when the sunlight struck Larry’s eyeballs like needles, he suddenly changed his mind. No walk. Uh-uh. His eyes had been turned into magnifying glasses, and soon the sun would shine through them long enough to set his brains on fire. His poor old brains felt tinder-dry.

Wayne, gripping his arm firmly, insisted. They went down to the beach, over the warming sand to the darker brown hardpack, and Larry decided it had been a pretty good idea after all. The deepening sound of the breakers coming home was soothing. A gull, working to gain altitude, hung straining in the blue sky like a sketched white letter M.

Wayne tugged his arm firmly. “Come on.”

Larry got all the miles he had felt he could walk. Except that he no longer felt that way. He had an ugly headache and his spine felt as if it had turned to glass. His eyeballs were pulsing and his kidneys ached dully. An amphetamine hangover is not as painful as the morning after the night you got through a whole fifth of Four Roses, but it is not as pleasant as, say, balling Raquel Welch would be. If he had another couple of uppers, he could climb neatly on top of this eight-ball that wanted to run him down. He reached in his pocket to get them and for the first time became aware that he was clad only in skivvies that had been fresh three days ago.

“Wayne, I wanna go back.”

“Let’s walk a little more.” He thought that Wayne was looking at him strangely, with a mixture of exasperation and pity.

“No, man, I only got my shorts on. I’ll get picked up for indecent exposure.”

“On this part of the coast you could wrap a bandanna around your wingwang and let your balls hang free and still not get picked up for indecent exposure. Come on, man.”

“I’m tired,” Larry said querulously. He began to feel pissed at Wayne. This was Wayne’s way of getting back at him, because Larry had a hit and he, Wayne, only had a keyboard credit on the new album. He was no different than Julie. Everybody hated him now. Everyone had the knife out. His eyes blurred with easy tears.

“Come on, man,” Wayne repeated, and they struck off up the beach again.

They had walked perhaps another mile when double cramps struck the big muscles in Larry’s thighs. He screamed and collapsed onto the sand. It felt as if twin stilettos had been planted in his flesh at the same instant.

“Cramps!” he screamed. “Oh man, cramps!”

Wayne squatted beside him and pulled his legs out straight. The agony hit again, and then Wayne went to work, hitting the knotted muscles, kneading them. At last the oxygen-starved tissues began to loosen.

Larry, who had been holding his breath, began to gasp. “Oh man,” he said. “Thanks. That was… that was bad.”

“Sure,” Wayne said, without much sympathy. “I bet it was, Larry. How are you now?”

“Okay. But let’s just sit, huh? Then we’ll go back.”

“I want to talk to you. I had to get you out here and I wanted you straight enough so you could understand what I was laying on you.”

“What’s that, Wayne?” He thought: Here it comes. The pitch. But what Wayne said seemed so far from a pitch that for a moment he was back with the Superboy comic, trying to make sense of a six-word sentence.

“The party’s got to end, Larry.”

“Huh?”

“The party. When you go back. You pull all the plugs, give everybody their car keys, thank everyone for a lovely time, and see them out the front door. Get rid of them.”

“I can’t do that!” Larry said, shocked.

“You better,” Wayne said.

“But why? Man, this party’s just getting going!”

“Larry, how much has Columbia paid you up front?”

“Why would you want to know?” Larry asked slyly.

“Do you think I want to suck off you, Larry? Think.”

Larry thought, and with dawning bewilderment he realized there was no reason why Wayne Stukey would want to put the arm on him. He hadn’t really made it yet, was scuffling for jobs like most of the people who had helped Larry cut the album, but unlike most of them, Wayne came from a family with money and he was on good terms with his people. Wayne’s father owned half of the country’s third-largest electronic games company, and the Stukeys had a modestly palatial home in Bel Air. Bewildered, Larry realized that his own sudden good fortune probably looked like small bananas to Wayne.

“No, I guess not,” he said gruffly. “I’m sorry. But it seems like every tinhorn cockroach-chaser west of Las Vegas—”

“So how much?”

Larry thought it over. “Seven grand up front. All told.”

“They’re paying you quarterly royalties on the single and biannually on the album?”

“Right.”

Wayne nodded. “They hold it until the eagle screams, the bastards. Cigarette?”

Larry took one and cupped the end for a light.

“Do you know how much this party’s costing you?”

“Sure,” Larry said.

“You didn’t rent the house for less than a thousand.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” It had actually been $1,200 plus a $500 damage deposit. He had paid the deposit and half the month’s rent, a total of $1,100 with $600 owing.

“How much for dope?” Wayne asked.

“Aw, man, you got to have something. It’s like cheese for Ritz crackers—”

“There was pot and there was coke. How much, come on?”

“The fucking DA,” Larry said sulkily. “Five hundred and five hundred.”

“And it was gone the second day.”

“The hell it was!” Larry said, startled. “I saw two bowls when we went out this morning, man. Most of it was gone, yeah, but—”

“Man, don’t you remember the Deck?” Wayne’s voice suddenly dropped into an amazingly good parody of Larry’s own drawling voice. “Just put it on my tab, Dewey. Keep em full.”

Larry looked at Wayne with dawning horror. He did remember a small, wiry guy with a peculiar haircut, a whiffle cut they had called it ten or fifteen years ago, a small guy with a whiffle haircut and a T-shirt reading JESUS IS COMING & IS HE PISSED. This guy seemed to have good dope practically failing out of his asshole. He could even remember telling this guy, Dewey the Deck, to keep his hospitality bowls full and put it on his tab. But that had been… well, that had been days ago.

Wayne said, “You’re the best thing to happen to Dewey Deck in a long time, man.”

“How much is he into me for?”

“Not bad on pot. Pot’s cheap. Twelve hundred. Eight grand on coke.”

For a minute Larry thought he was going to puke. He goggled silently at Wayne. He tried to speak and he could only mouth: Ninety-two hundred?

“Inflation, man,” Wayne said. “You want the rest?”

Larry didn’t want the rest, but he nodded.

“There was a color TV upstairs. Someone ran a chair through it. I’d guess three hundred for repairs. The wood paneling downstairs has been gouged to hell. Four hundred. With luck. The picture window facing the beach got broken the day before yesterday. Three hundred. The shag rug in the living room is totally kaput—cigarette burns, beer, whiskey. Four hundred. I called the liquor store and they’re just as happy with their tab as the Deck is with his. Six hundred.”

“Six hundred for booze?” Larry whispered. Blue horror had encased him up to the neck.

“Be thankful most of them have been scoffing beer and wine. You’ve got a four-hundred-dollar tab down at the market, mostly for pizza, chips, tacos, all that good shit. But the worst is the noise. Pretty soon the cops are going to land. Les flics. Disturbing the peace. And you’ve got four or five heavies doing up on heroin. There’s three or four ounces of Mexican brown in the place.”

“Is that on my tab, too?” Larry asked hoarsely.

“No. The Deck doesn’t mess with heroin. That’s an Organization item and the Deck doesn’t like the idea of cement cowboy boots. But if the cops land, you can bet the bust will go on your tab.”

“But I didn’t know—”

“Just a babe in the woods, yeah.”

“But—”

“Your total tab for this little shindy so far comes to over twelve thousand dollars,” Wayne said. “You went out and picked that Z off the lot… how much did you put down?”

“Twenty-five,” Larry said numbly. He felt like crying.

“So what have you got until the next royalty check? Couple thousand?”

“That’s about right,” Larry said, unable to tell Wayne he had less than that: about eight hundred, split evenly between cash and checking.

“Larry, you listen to me because you’re not worth telling twice. There’s always a party waiting to happen. Out here the only two constants are the constant bullshitting and the constant party. They come running like dickey birds looking for bugs on a hippo’s back. Now they’re here. Pick them off your carcass and send them on their way.”

Larry thought of the dozens of people in the house. He knew maybe one person in three at this point. The thought of telling all those unknown people to leave made his throat want to close up. He would lose their good opinion. Opposing this thought came an image of Dewey Deck refilling the hospitality bowls, taking a notebook from his back pocket, and writing it all down at the bottom of his tab. Him and his whiffle haircut and his trendy T-shirt.

Wayne watched him calmly as he squirmed between these two pictures.

“Man, I’m gonna look like the asshole of the world,” Larry said finally, hating the weak and petulant words as they fell from his mouth.

“Yeah, they’ll call you a lot of names. They’ll say you’re going Hollywood. Getting a big head. Forgetting your old friends. Except none of them are your friends, Larry. Your friends saw what was happening three days ago and split the scene. It’s no fun to watch a friend who’s, like, pissed his pants and doesn’t even know it.”

“So why tell me?” Larry asked, suddenly angry. The anger was prodded out of him by the realization that all his really good friends had taken off, and in retrospect all their excuses seemed lame. Barry Grieg had taken him aside, had tried to talk to him, but Larry had been really flying, and he had just nodded and smiled indulgently at Barry. Now he wondered if Barry had been trying to lay this same rap on him. It made him embarrassed and angry to think so.

“Why tell me?” he repeated. “I get the feeling you don’t like me so very goddam much.”

“No… but I really don’t dislike you, either. Beyond that, man, I couldn’t say. I could have let you get your nose punched on this. Once would have been enough for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll tell them. Because there’s a hard streak in you. There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil. Whatever it takes to make success, you’ve got it. You’ll have a nice little career. Middle-of-the-road pop no one will remember in five years. The junior high boppers will collect your records. You’ll make money.”

Larry balled his fists on his legs. He wanted to punch that calm face. Wayne was saying things that made him feel like a small pile of dogshit beside a stop sign.

“Go on back and pull the plug,” Wayne said softly. “Then you get in that car and go. Just go, man. Stay away until you know that next royalty check is waiting for you.”

“But Dewey—”

“I’ll find a man to talk to Dewey. My pleasure, man. The guy will tell Dewey to wait for his money like a good little boy, and Dewey will be happy to oblige.” He paused, watching two small children in bright bathing suits run up the beach. A dog ran beside them, rowfing loudly and cheerily at the blue sky.

Larry stood up and forced himself to say thanks. The sea breeze slipped in and out of his aging shorts. The word came out of his mouth like a brick.

“You just go away somewhere and get your shit together,” Wayne said, standing up beside him, still watching the children. “You’ve got a lot of shit to get together. What kind of manager you want, what kind of tour you want, what kind of contract you want after Pocket Savior hits. I think it will; its got that neat little beat. If you give yourself some room, you’ll figure it all out. Guys like you always do.”

Guys like you always do.

Guys like me always do.

Guys like—

Somebody was tapping a finger on the window.

Larry jerked, then sat up. A bolt of pain went through his neck and he winced at the dead, cramped feel of the flesh there. He had been asleep, not just dozing. Reliving California. But here and now it was gray New York daylight, and the finger tapped again.

He turned his head cautiously and painfully and saw his mother, wearing a black net scarf over her hair, peering in.

For a moment they just stared at each other through the glass and Larry felt curiously naked, like an animal being looked at in the zoo. Then his mouth took over, smiling, and he cranked the window down.

“Mom?”

“I knew it was you,” she said in a queerly flat tone. “Come on out of there and let me see what you look like standing up.”

Both legs had gone to sleep; pins and needles tingled up from the balls of his feet as he opened the door and got out. He had never expected to meet her this way, unprepared and exposed. He felt like a sentry who had fallen asleep at his post suddenly called to attention. He had somehow expected his mother to look smaller, less sure of herself, a trick of the years that had matured him and left her just the same.

But it was almost uncanny, the way she had caught him. When he was ten, she used to wake him up on Saturday mornings after she thought he had slept long enough by tapping one finger on his closed bedroom door. She had wakened him this same way fourteen years later, sleeping in his new car like a tired kid who had tried to stay up all night and got caught by the sandman in an undignified position.

Now he stood before her, his hair corkscrewed, a faint and rather foolish grin on his face. Pins and needles still coursed up his legs, making him shift from foot to foot. He remembered that she always asked him if he had to go to the bathroom when he did that and now he stopped the movement and let the needles prick him at will.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

She looked at him without saying anything, and a dread suddenly roosted in his heart like an evil bird coming back to an old nest. It was a fear that she might turn away from him, deny him, show him the back of her cheap coat, and simply go off to the subway around the corner, leaving him.

Then she sighed, the way a man will sigh before picking up a heavy bundle. And when she spoke, her voice was so natural and so mildly—rightly—pleased that he forgot his first impression.

“Hi, Larry,” she said. “Come on upstairs. I knew it was you when I looked out the window. I already called in sick at my building. I got sick time coming.”

She turned to lead him back up the steps, between the vanished stone dogs. He came three steps behind her, catching up, wincing at the pins and needles. “Mom?”

She turned back to him and he hugged her. For a moment an expression of fright crossed her features, as if she expected to be mugged rather than hugged. Then it passed and she accepted his embrace and gave back her own. The smell of her sachet slipped up his nose, evoking unexpected nostalgia, fierce, sweet, and bitter. For a moment he thought he was going to cry, and was smugly sure that she would; it was A Touching Moment. Over her sloped right shoulder he could see the dead cat, lying half in and half out of the garbage can. When she pulled away, her eyes were dry.

“Come on, I’ll make you some breakfast. Have you been driving all night?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice slightly hoarse with emotion.

“Well, come on. Elevator’s broken, but it’s only two floors. It’s worse for Mrs. Halsey with her arthritis. She’s on five. Don’t forget to wipe your feet. If you track in, Mr. Freeman will be on me like a shot. I swear Goshen he can smell dirt. Dirt’s his enemy, all right.” They were on the stairs now. “Can you eat three eggs? I’ll make toast, too, if you don’t mind pumpernickel. Come on.”

He followed her past the vanished stone dogs and looked a little wildly at where they had been, just to reassure himself that they were really gone; that he had not shrunk two feet, that the whole decade of the 1980s had not vanished back into time. She pushed the doors open and they went in. Even the dark brown shadows and the smells of cooking were the same.

Alice Underwood fixed him three eggs, bacon, toast, juice, coffee. When he had finished all but the coffee, he lit a cigarette and pushed back from the table. She flashed the cigarette a disapproving look but said nothing. That restored some of his confidence—some, but not much. She had always been good at biding her time.

She dropped the iron spider skillet into the gray dishwater and it hissed a little. She hadn’t changed much, Larry was thinking. A little older—she would be fifty-one now—a little grayer, but there was still plenty of black left in that sensibly netted head of hair. She was wearing a plain gray dress, probably the one she worked in. Her bosom was still the same large comber blooming out of the bodice of the dress—a little larger, if anything. Mom, tell me the truth, has your bosom gotten bigger? Is that the fundamental change?

He started to tap cigarette ashes into his coffee saucer; she jerked it away and replaced it with the ashtray she always kept in the cupboard. The saucer had been sloppy with coffee and it had seemed okay to tap in it. The ashtray was clean, reproachfully spotless, and he tapped into it with a slight pang. She could bide her time and she could keep springing small traps on you until your ankles were all bloody and you were ready to start gibbering.

“So you came back,” Alice said, taking a used Brill from a Table Talk pie dish and putting it to work on the skillet. “What brought you?”

Well, Ma, this friend of mine clued me in to the facts of life—the assholes travel in packs and this time they were after me. I don’t know if friend is the right word for him. He respects me musically about as much as I respect The 1910 Fruitgum Company. But he got me to put on my traveling shoes and wasn’t it Robert Frost who said home is a place that when you go there they have to take you in?

Aloud he said, “I guess I got to missing you, Mom.”

She snorted. “That’s why you wrote me often?”

“I’m not much of a letter-writer.” He pumped his cigarette slowly up and down. Smoke rings formed from the tip and drifted off.

“You can say that again.”

Smiling, he said: “I’m not much of a letter-writer.”

“But you’re still smart to your mother. That hasn’t changed.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “How have you been, Mom?”

She put the skillet in the drainer, pulled the sink stopper, and wiped the lace of soapsuds from her reddened hands. “Not so bad,” she said, coming over to the table and sitting down. “My back pains me some, but I got my pills. I make out all right.”

“You haven’t thrown it out of whack since I left?”

“Oh, once. But Dr. Holmes took care of it.”

“Mom, those Chiropractors are—” just frauds. He bit his tongue.

“Are what?”

He shrugged uncomfortably in the face of her hooked smile. “You’re free, white, and twenty-one. If he helps you, fine.”

She sighed and took a roll of wintergreen Life Savers from her dress pocket. “I’m a lot more than twenty-one. And I feel it. Want one?” He shook his head at the Life Saver she had thumbed up. She popped it into her own mouth instead.

“You’re just a girl yet,” he said with a touch of his old bantering flattery. She had always liked it, but now it brought only a ghost of a smile to her lips. “Any new men in your life?”

“Several,” she said. “How bout you?”

“No,” he said seriously. “No new men. Some girls, but no new men.”

He had hoped for laughter, but got only the ghost smile again. I’m troubling her, he thought. That’s what it is. She doesn’t know what I want here. She hasn’t been waiting for three years for me to show up after all. She only wanted me to stay lost.

“Same old Larry,” she said. “Never serious. You’re not engaged? Seeing anyone steadily?”

“I play the field, Mom.”

“You always did. At least you never came home to tell me you’d got some nice Catholic girl in a family way. I’ll give you that. You were either very careful, very lucky, or very polite.”

He strove to keep a poker face. It was the first time in his life that she had ever mentioned sex to him, directly or obliquely.

“Anyway, you’re gonna learn,” Alice said. “They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty, the way that Mr. Freeman is. He’s got that sidewalk-level apartment and he’s always standing there, in the window, hoping for a strong breeze.”

Larry grunted.

“I hear that song you got on the radio. I tell people, that’s my son. That’s Larry. Most of them don’t believe it.”

“You’ve heard it?” He wondered why she hadn’t mentioned that first, instead of going into all this piddling shit.

“Sure, all the time on that rock and roll station the young girls listen to. WROK.”

“Do you like it?”

“As well as I like any of that music.” She looked at him firmly. “I think some of it sounds suggestive. Lewd.”

He found himself shuffling his feet and forced himself to stop. “It’s just supposed to sound… passionate, Mom. That’s all.” His face suffused with blood. He had never expected to be sitting in his mother’s kitchen, discussing passion.

“The place for passion’s the bedroom,” she said curtly, closing off any aesthetic discussion of his hit record. “Also, you did something to your voice. You sound like a nigger.”

“Now?” he asked, amused.

“No, on the radio.”

“That brown soun, she sho do get aroun,” Larry said, deepening his voice to Bill Withers level and smiling.

“Just like that,” she nodded. “When I was a girl, we thought Frank Sinatra was daring. Now they have this rap. Rap, they call it. Screaming, I call it.” She looked at him grudgingly. “At least there’s no screaming on your record.”

“I get a royalty,” he said. “A certain percent of every record sold. It breaks down to—”

“Oh, go on,” she said, and made a shooing gesture with her hand. “I flunked all my maths. Have they paid you yet, or did you get that little car on credit?”

“They haven’t paid me much,” he said, skating up to the edge of the lie but not quite over it. “I made a down payment on the car. I’m financing the rest.”

“Easy credit terms,” she said balefully. “That’s how your father ended up bankrupt. The doctor said he died of a heart attack, but it wasn’t that. It was a broken heart. Your dad went to his grave on easy credit terms.”

This was an old rap, and Larry just let it flow over him, nodding at the right places. His father had owned a haberdashery. A Robert Hall had opened not far away, and a year later his business had failed. He had turned to food for solace, putting on 110 pounds in three years. He had dropped dead in the corner luncheonette when Larry was nine, a half-finished meatball sandwich on his plate in front of him. At the wake, when her sister tried to comfort a woman who looked absolutely without need of comfort, Alice Underwood said it could have been worse. It could, she said, looking past her sister’s shoulder and directly at her brother-in-law, have been drink.

Alice brought Larry the rest of the way up on her own, dominating his life with her proverbs and prejudices until he left home. Her last remark to him as he and Rudy Schwartz drove off in Rudy’s old Ford was that they had poorhouses in California, too. Yessir, that’s my mamma.

“Do you want to stay here, Larry?” she asked softly.

Startled, he countered, “Do you mind?”

“There’s room. The rollaway’s still in the back bedroom. I’ve been storing things back there, but you could move some of the boxes around.”

“All right,” he said slowly. “If you’re sure you don’t mind. I’m only in for a couple of weeks. I thought I’d look up some of the old guys. Mark… Galen… David… Chris… those guys.”

She got up, went to the window, and tugged it up.

“You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, Larry. I’m not so good at expressing myself, maybe, but I’m glad to see you. We didn’t say goodbye very well. There were harsh words.” She showed him her face, still harsh, but also full of a terrible, reluctant love. “For my part, I regret them. I only said them because I love you. I never knew how to say that just right, so I said it in other ways.”

“That’s all right,” he said, looking down at the table. The flush was back. He could feel it. “Listen, I’ll chip in for stuff.”

“You can if you want. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. I’m working. Thousands aren’t. You’re still my son.”

He thought of the stiffening cat, half in and half out of the trash can, and of Dewey the Deck, smilingly filling the hospitality bowls, and he suddenly burst into tears. As his hands blurred double in the wash of them, he thought that this should be her bit, not his—nothing had gone the way he thought it would, nothing. She had changed after all. So had he, but not as he had suspected. An unnatural reversal had occurred; she had gotten bigger and he had somehow gotten smaller. He had not come home to her because he had to go somewhere. He had come home because he was afraid and he wanted his mother.

She stood by the open window, watching him. The white curtains fluttered in on the damp breeze, obscuring her face, not hiding it entirely but making it seem ghostly. Traffic sounds came in through the window. She took the handkerchief from the bodice of her dress and walked over to the table and put it in one of his groping hands. There was something hard in Larry. She could have taxed him with it, but to what end? His father had been a softie, and in her heart of hearts she knew it was that which had really sent him to the grave; Max Underwood had been done in more by lending credit than taking it. So when it came to that hard streak? Who did Larry have to thank? Or blame?

His tears couldn’t change that stony outcropping in his character any more than a single summer cloudburst can change the shape of rock. There were good uses for such hardness—she knew that, had known it as a woman raising a boy on her own in a city that cared little for mothers and less for their children—but Larry hadn’t found any yet. He was just what she had said he was: the same old Larry. He would go along, not thinking, getting people—including himself—into jams, and when the jams got bad enough, he would call upon that hard streak to extricate himself. As for the others? He would leave them to sink or swim on their own. Rock was tough, and there was toughness in his character, but he still used it destructively. She could see it in his eyes, read it in every line of his posture… even in the way he bobbed his cancer-stick to make those little rings in the air. He had never sharpened that hard piece of him into a blade to cut people with, and that was something, but when he needed it, he was still calling on it as a child did—as a bludgeon to beat his way out of traps he had dug for himself. Once, she had told herself Larry would change. She had; he would.

But this was no boy in front of her; this was a grown-up man, and she feared that his days of change—the deep and fundamental sort her minister called a change of soul rather than one of heart—were behind him. There was something in Larry that gave you the bitter zing of hearing chalk screech on a blackboard. Deep inside, looking out, was only Larry. He was the only one allowed inside his heart. But she loved him.

She also thought there was good in Larry, great good. It was there, but this late on it would take nothing short of a catastrophe to bring it out. There was no catastrophe here; only her weeping son.

“You’re tired,” she said. “Clean up. I’ll move the boxes, then you can sleep. I guess I’ll go in today after all.”

She went down the short hall to the back room, his old bedroom, and Larry heard her grunting and moving boxes. He wiped his eyes slowly. The sound of traffic came in the window. He tried to remember the last time he had cried in front of his mother. He thought of the dead cat. She was right. He was tired. He had never been so tired. He went to bed and slept for nearly eighteen hours.

Chapter 6

It was late afternoon when Frannie went out back to where her father was patiently weeding the peas and beans. She had been a late child and he was in his sixties now, his white hair coming out from under the baseball cap he always wore. Her mother was in Portland, shopping for white gloves. Fran’s best childhood friend, Amy Lauder, was getting married early next month.

She looked down at her dad’s back for a peaceful moment, just loving him. At this time of day the light took on a special quality that she loved, a timeless quality that belonged only to that most fleeting Maine genus, early summer. She could think of that particular tone of light in the middle of January and—it would make her heart ache fiercely. The light of an early summer afternoon as it slipped toward dark had so many good things wrapped up in it: baseball at the Little League park, where Fred had always played third and batted clean-up; watermelon; first corn; iced tea in chilled glasses; childhood.

Frannie cleared her throat a little. “Need a hand?”

He turned and grinned. “Hello, Fran. Caught me diggin, didn’t you?”

“I guess I did.”

“Is your mother back yet?” He frowned vaguely, and then his face cleared. “No, that’s right, she just went, didn’t she. Sure, pitch a hand if you want to. Just don’t forget to wash up afterward.”

“A lady’s hands proclaim her habits,” Fran mocked lightly and snorted. Peter tried to look disapproving and did a poor job of it.

She got down in the row next to him and began to weed. Sparrows were twittering and there was a constant hum of traffic on US 1, less than a block from here. It hadn’t reached the volume it would in July, when there would be a fatal accident nearly every day between here and Kittery, but it was building.

Peter told her about his day and she responded with the right questions, nodding in places. Intent on his work, he wouldn’t see her nods, but the corner of his eye would catch her shadow nodding. He was a machinist in a large Sanford auto parts firm, the largest auto firm north of Boston. He was sixty-four and about to start on his last year of work before retirement. A short year at that, because he had four weeks’ vacation time stockpiled, which he planned to take in September, after the “ijits” went home. The retirement was much on his mind. He was trying not to look at it as a never-ending vacation, he told her; he had enough friends in retirement now who had brought back the news that it wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t think he would be as bored as Harlan Enders or as shamefully poor as the Carom—there was poor Paul, hardly ever missed a day at the shop in his life, and yet he and his wife had been forced to sell their house and move in with their daughter and her husband.

Peter Goldsmith hadn’t been content with Social Security; he had never trusted it, even in the days before the system began to break down under recession, inflation, and the steadily increasing number of people on the books. There hadn’t been many Democrats in Maine during the thirties and forties, he told his listening daughter, but her grandfather had been one, and her grandfather had by-God made one out of her father. In Ogunquit’s palmiest days, that had made the Goldsmiths pariahs of a kind. But his father had had one saying as rock-ribbed as the stoniest Maine Republican’s philosophy: Put not your trust in the princes of this world, for they will frig thee up and so shalt their governments, even unto the end of the earth.

Frannie laughed. She loved it when her dad talked this way. It wasn’t a way he talked often, because the woman that was his wife and her mother would (and had) all but cut the tongue out of his head with the acid which could flow so quickly and freely from her own.

You had to trust yourself, he continued, and let the princes of this world get along as best they could with the people who had elected them. Most times that wasn’t very well, but that was okay; they deserved each other.

“Hard cash is the answer,” he told Frannie. “Will Rogers said it was land, because that’s the only thing they’re not making any more of, but the same goes for gold and silver. A man who loves money is a bastard, someone to be hated. A man who can’t take care of it is a fool. You don’t hate him, but you got to pity him.”

Fran wondered if he was thinking of poor Paul Caron, who had been his friend since before Fran herself was born, and decided not to ask.

At any rate, she didn’t need him to tell her that he had socked away enough in the good years to keep them rolling. What he did tell her was that she had never been a burden to them, in good times or in bad, and he was proud to tell his friends he had sent her through school. What his money and her brains hadn’t been able to take care of, he told them, she had done the old-fashioned way: by bending her back and shucking her buns. Working, and working hard, if you wanted to cut through the country bullshit. Her mother didn’t always understand that. Changes had come for women, whether the women always liked them or not, and it was hard for Carla to get it through her head that Fran wasn’t down there at UNH husband-hunting.

“She sees Amy Lauder getting married,” Peter said, “and she thinks, ‘That should be my Fran. Amy’s pretty, but when you put my Fran beside her, Amy Lauder looks like an old dish with a crack in it.’ Your mother has been using the old yardsticks all her life, and she can’t change now. So if you n her scrape together a bit and make some sparks from time to time, like steel against flint, that’s why. No one is to blame. But you have to remember, Fran, she’s too old to change, but you are getting old enough to understand that.”

From this he rambled back to his job again, telling her about how one of his co-workers had almost lost his thumb in a small press because his mind was down at the pool-hall while his damn thumb was under the stamp. Good thing Lester Crowley had pulled him away in time. But, he added, someday Lester Crowley wouldn’t be there. He sighed, as if remembering he wouldn’t be either, then brightened and began telling her about an idea he’d had for a car antenna concealed in the hood ornament.

His voice switched from topic to topic, mellow and soothing. Their shadows grew longer, moving up the rows before them. She was lulled by it, as she always had been. She had come here to tell something, but since earliest childhood she had often come to tell and stayed to listen. He didn’t bore her. So far as she knew, he didn’t bore anyone, except possibly her mother. He was a storyteller, and a good one.

She became aware that he had stopped talking. He was sitting on a rock at the end of his row, tamping his pipe and looking at her.

“What’s on your mind, Frannie?”

She looked at him dumbly for a moment, not sure how she should proceed. She had come out here to tell him, and now she wasn’t sure if she could. The silence hung between them, growing larger, and at last it was a gulf she couldn’t stand. She jumped.

“I’m pregnant,” she said simply.

He stopped filling his pipe and just looked at her. “Pregnant,” he said, as if he had never heard the word before. Then he said: “Oh, Frannie… is it a joke? Or a game?”

“No, Daddy.”

“You better come over here and sit with me.”

Obediently, she came up the row and sat next to him. There was a rock wall that divided their land from the town common next door. Beyond the rock wall was a tangled, sweet-smelling hedge that had long ago run wild in the most amiable way. Her head was pounding and she felt a little sick to her stomach.

“For sure?” he asked her.

“For sure,” she said, and then—there was no artifice in it, not a trace, she simply couldn’t help it—she began to cry in great, braying sobs. He held her with one arm for what seemed to be a very long time. When her tears began to taper off, she forced herself to ask the question that troubled her the most.

“Daddy, do you still like me?”

“What?” He looked at her, puzzled. “Yes. I still like you fine, Frannie.”

That made her cry again, but this time he let her tend herself while he got his pipe going. Borkum Riff began to ride slowly off on the faint breeze.

“Are you disappointed?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I never had a pregnant daughter before and am not sure just how I should take it. Was it that Jess?”

She nodded.

“You told him?”

She nodded again.

“What did he say?”

“He said he would marry me. Or pay for an abortion.”

“Marriage or abortion,” Peter Goldsmith said, and drew on his pipe. “He’s a regular two-gun Sam.”

She looked down at her hands, splayed on her jeans. There was dirt in the small creases of the knuckles and dirt under the nails. A lady’s hands proclaim her habits, the mental mother spoke up. A pregnant daughter. I’ll have to resign my membership in the church. A lady’s hands—

Her father said: “I don’t want to get any more personal than I have to, but wasn’t he… or you… being careful?”

“I had birth control pills,” she said. “They didn’t work.”

“Then I can’t put any blame, unless it’s on both of you,” he said, looking at her closely. “And I can’t do that, Frannie. I can’t lay blame. Sixty-four has a way of forgetting what twenty-one was like. So we won’t talk about blame.”

She felt a great relief come over her, and it was a little like swooning.

“Your mother will have plenty to say about blame,” he said, “and I won’t stop her, but I won’t be with her. Do you understand that?”

She nodded. Her father never tried to oppose her mother anymore. Not out loud. There was that acid tongue of hers. When she was opposed, it sometimes got out of control, he had told Frannie once. And when it was out of control, she just might take a notion to cut anyone with it and think of sorry too late to do the wounded much good. Frannie had an idea that her father might have faced a choice many years ago: continued opposition resulting in divorce, or surrender. He had chosen the latter—but on his own terms.

She asked quietly: “Are you sure you can stay out of this one, Daddy?”

“You asking me to take your part?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“With Mom?”

“No. With you, Frannie.”

“I don’t know.”

“Marry him? Two can live as cheap as one, that’s what they say, anyway.”

“I don’t think I can do that. I think I’ve fallen out of love with him, if I was ever in.”

“The baby?” His pipe was drawing well now, and the smoke was sweet on the summer air. Shadows were gathering in the garden’s hollows, and the crickets were beginning to hum.

“No, the baby isn’t the reason why. It was happening anyway. Jesse is…” She trailed off, trying to put her finger on what was wrong with Jesse, the thing that could be overlooked by the rush the baby was putting on her, the rush to decide and get out from under the threatening shadow of her mother, who was now at a shopping mall buying gloves for the wedding of Fran’s childhood friend. The thing that could be buried now but would nonetheless rest unquiet for six months, sixteen months, or twenty-six, only to rise finally from its grave and attack them both. Marry in haste, repent in leisure. One of her mother’s favorite sayings.

“He’s weak,” she said. “I can’t explain better than that.”

“You don’t really trust him to do right by you, do you, Frannie?”

“No,” she said, thinking that her father had just gotten closer to the root of it than she had. She didn’t trust Jesse, who came from money and wore blue chambray workshirts. “Jesse means well. He wants to do the right thing; he really does. But… we went to a poetry reading two semesters ago. It was given by a man named Ted Enslin. The place was packed. Everyone was listening very solemnly… very carefully… so as not to miss a word. And me… you know me…”

He put a comfortable arm around her and said, “Frannie got the giggles.”

“Yeah. That’s right. I guess you know me pretty well.”

“I know a little,” he said.

“They—the giggles, I mean—just came out of nowhere. I kept thinking, ‘The scruffy man, the scruffy man, we all came to listen to the scruffy man.’ It had a beat, like a song you might hear on the radio. And I got the giggles. I didn’t mean to. It really didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Enslin’s poetry; it was pretty good, or even with the way he looked. It was the way they were looking at him.”

She glanced at her father to see how he was taking this. He simply nodded for her to go on.

“Anyway, I had to get out of there. I mean I really had to. And Jesse was furious with me. I’m sure he had a right to be mad… it was a childish thing to do, a childish way to feel, I’m sure… but that’s the way I often am. Not always. I can get a job done—”

“Yes, you can.”

“But sometimes—”

“Sometimes King Laugh knocks and you’re one of those people who can’t keep him out,” Peter said.

“I guess I must be. Anyway, Jess isn’t one of those people. And if we were married… he’d keep coming home to that unwanted guest that I had let in. Not every day, but often enough to make him mad. Then I’d try, and… and I guess…”

“I guess you’d be unhappy,” Peter said, hugging her tighter against his side.

“I guess I would,” she said.

“Don’t let your mother change your mind, then.”

She closed her eyes, her relief even greater this time. He had understood. By some miracle.

“What do you think of me getting an abortion?” she asked after a while.

“My guess is that’s really what you wanted to talk about.”

She looked at him, startled.

He looked back, half-quizzical, half-smiling, one bushy eyebrow—the left—cocked. Yet the overall impression she took from him was one of great gravity.

“Maybe that’s true,” she said slowly.

“Listen,” he said, and then fell paradoxically silent. But she was listening and she heard a sparrow, crickets, the far high hum of a plane, someone calling for Jackie to come on in now, a power mower, a car with a glasspack muffler accelerating down US 1.

She was just about to ask him if he was all right when he took her hand and spoke.

“Frannie, you’ve no business having such an old man for a father, but I can’t help it. I never married until 1956.”

He looked at her thoughtfully in the dusklight.

“Carla was different in those days. She was… oh, hellfire, she was young herself, for one thing. She didn’t change until your brother Freddy died. Until then, she was young. She stopped growing after Freddy died. That… you mustn’t think I’m talking against your mother, Frannie, even if it sounds a little like I am. But it seems to me that Carla stopped… growing… after Freddy died. She slapped three coats of lacquer and one of quick-dry cement on her way of looking at things and called it good. Now she’s like a guard in a museum, and if she sees anyone tampering with the ideas on display there, she gives them a lot of look-out-below. But she wasn’t always like that. You’ll just have to take my word for it, but she wasn’t.”

“What was she like, Daddy?”

“Why…” He looked vaguely out across the garden. “She was a lot like you, Frannie. She got the giggles. We used to go down to Boston to see the Red Sox play and during the seventh-inning stretch she’d go out with me to the concession and have a beer.”

“Mamma… drank beer?”

“Yes, she did. And she’d spend most of the ninth in the ladies’ and come out cussing me for making her miss the best part of the game when all the time it was she tellin me to go on down to the concession stand and get em.”

Frannie tried to imagine her mother with a cup of Narragansett beer in one hand, looking up at her father and laughing, like a girl on a date. She simply couldn’t do it.

“She never kindled,” he said, bemused. “We went to a doctor, she and I, to see which of us was wrong. The doctor said neither one. Then, in ‘60, there came your brother Fred. She just about loved that boy to death, Fran. Fred was her father’s name, you know. She had a miscarriage in ‘65, and we both figured that was the end of it. Then you came along in ‘69, a month early but just fine. And I just about loved you to death. We each had one of our own. But she lost hers.”

He fell silent, brooding. Fred Goldsmith had died in 1973. He had been thirteen, Frannie four. The man who hit Fred had been drunk. He had a long list of traffic violations, including speeding, driving so as to endanger, and driving under the influence. Fred had lived seven days.

“I think abortion’s too clean a name for it,” Peter Goldsmith said. His lips moved slowly over each word, as if they pained him. “I think it’s infanticide, pure and simple. I’m sorry to say so, to be so… inflexible, set, whatever it is I’m being… about something which you now have to consider, if only because the law says you may consider it. I told you I was an old man.”

“You’re not old, Daddy,” she murmured.

“I am, I am!” he said roughly. He looked suddenly distraught. “I’m an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it’s like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear. A drunk driver took my son’s life seventeen years ago and my wife has never been the same since. I’ve always seen the question of abortion in terms of Fred. I seem to be helpless to see it any other way, just as helpless as you were to stop your giggles when they came on you at that poetry reading, Frannie. Your mother would argue against it for all the standard reasons. Morality, she’d say. A morality that goes back two thousand years. The right to life. All our Western morality is based on that idea. I’ve read the philosophers. I range up and down them like a housewife with a dividend check in the Sears and Roebuck store. Your mother sticks with the Reader’s Digest, but it’s me that ends up arguing from feeling and her from the codes of morality. I just see Fred. He was destroyed inside. There was no chance for him. These right-to-life biddies hold up their pictures of babies drowned in salt, and arms and legs scraped out onto a steel table, so what? The end of a life is never pretty. I just see Fred, lying in that bed for seven days, everything that was ruined pasted over with bandages. Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper. I read more than she does, but she is the one who ends up making more sense on this one. What we do and what we think… those things are so often based on arbitrary judgments when they are right. I can’t get over that. It’s like a block in my throat, how all true logic seems to proceed from irrationality. From faith. I’m not making much sense, am I?”

“I don’t want an abortion,” she said quietly. “For my own reasons.”

“What are they?”

“The baby is partly me,” she said, lifting her chin slightly. “If that’s ego, I don’t care.”

“Will you give it up, Frannie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to?”

“No. I want to keep it.”

He was silent. She thought she felt his disapproval.

“You’re thinking of school, aren’t you?” she asked.

“No,” he said, standing up. He put his hands in the small of his back and grimaced pleasurably as his spine crackled. “I was thinking we’ve talked enough. And that you don’t have to make that decision just yet.”

“Mom’s home,” she said.

He turned to follow her gaze as the station wagon turned into the drive, the chrome winking in the day’s last light. Carla saw them, beeped the horn, and waved cheerily.

“I have to tell her,” Frannie said.

“Yes. But give it a day or two, Frannie.”

“All right.”

She helped him pick up the gardening tools and then they walked up toward the station wagon together.

Chapter 7

In the dim light that comes over the land just after sunset but before true dark, during one of those very few minutes that moviemakers call “the magic hour,” Vic Palfrey rose out of green delirium to brief lucidity.

I’m dying, he thought, and the words clanged strangely through his mind, making him believe he had spoken aloud, although he had not. He gazed around himself and saw a hospital bed, now cranked up to keep his lungs from drowning in themselves. He had been tightly secured with brass laundry-pins, and the sides of the bed were up. Been thrashing some, I guess, he thought with faint amusement. Been kicking up dickins. And belatedly: Where am I?

There was a bib around his neck and the bib was covered with clots of phlegm. His head ached. Queer thoughts danced in and out of his mind and he knew he had been delirious… and would be again. He was sick and this was not a cure or the beginning of one, but only a brief respite.

He put the inside of his right wrist against his forehead and pulled it away with a wince, the way you pull your hand off a hot stove. Burning up, all right, and full of tubes. Two small clear plastic ones were coming out of his nose. Another one snaked out from under the hospital sheet to a bottle on the floor, and he surely knew where the other end of that one was connected. Two bottles hung suspended from a rack beside the bed, a tube coming from each one and then joining to make a Y that ended by going into his arm just below the elbow. An IV feed.

You’d think that would be enough, he thought. But there were wires on him as well. Attached to his scalp. And chest. And left arm. One seemed to be plastered into his sonofabitching belly-button. And to cap it all off, he was pretty sure something was jammed up his ass. What in God’s name could that one be? Shit radar?

“Hey!”

He had intended a resonant, indignant shout. What he produced was the humble whisper of a very sick man. It came out surrounded on all sides by the phlegm on which he seemed to be choking.

Mamma, did George put the horse in?

That was the delirium talking. An irrational thought, zooming boldly across the field of more rational cogitation like a meteor. All the same, it almost fooled him for a second. He wasn’t going to be up for long. The thought filled him with panic. Looking at the scrawny sticks of his arms, he guessed he had lost as much as thirty pounds, and there hadn’t been all that much of him to start with. This… this whatever-it-was… was going to kill him. The idea that he might die babbling insanities and inanities like a senile old man terrified him.

Georgie’s gone courting Norma Willis. You get that horse your ownself, Vic, and put his nosebag on like a good boy.

Ain’t my job.

Victor, you love your mamma, now.

I do. But it ain’t —

You got to love your mamma, now. Mamma’s got the flu. No you don’t, Mamma. You got TB. It’s the TB that’s going to kill you. In nineteen and forty-seven. And George is going to die just about six days after he gets to Korea, time enough for just one letter and then bang bang bang. George is —

Vic, you help me now and put that horse in and that is my last word ON it.

“I’m the one with the flu, not her,” he whispered, surfacing again. “It’s me.”

He was looking at the door, and thinking it was a damn funny door even for a hospital. It was round at the corners, outlined with pop-rivets, and the lower jamb was set six inches or more up from the tile floor. Even a jackleg carpenter like Vic Palfrey could

(gimme the funnies Vic you had em long enough)

(Mamma he took my funny-pages! Give em back! Give em baaaack!)

build better than that. It was

(steel)

Something in the thought drove a nail deep into his brain and Vic struggled to sit up so he could see the door better. Yes, it was. It definitely was. A steel door. Why was he in a hospital behind a steel door? What had happened? Was he really dying? Had he best be thinking of just how he was going to meet his God? God, what had happened? He tried desperately to pierce the hanging gray fog, but only voices came through, far away, voices he could put no names against.

Now what I say is this… they just got to say… “fuck this inflation shit… ”

Better turn off your pumps, Hap.

(Hap? Bill Hapscomb? Who was he? I know that name)

Holy moly…

They’re dead, okay…

Gimme your hand and I’ll pull you up outta there…

Gimme the funnies Vic you had —

At that moment the sun sank far enough below the horizon to cause a light-activated circuit (or in this case, an absence-of-light-activated circuit) to kick in. The lights went on in Vic’s room. As the room lit up, he saw the row of faces observing him solemnly from behind two layers of glass and he screamed, at first thinking these were the people who had been holding conversations in his mind. One of the figures, a man in doctor’s whites, was gesturing urgently to someone outside Vic’s field of vision, but Vic was already over his scare. He was too weak to stay scared long. But the sudden fright that had come with the silent bloom of light and this vision of staring faces (like a jury of ghosts in their hospital whites) had cleared away some of the blockage in his mind and he knew where he was. Atlanta. Atlanta, Georgia. They had come and taken him away—him and Hap and Norm and Norm’s wife and Norm’s kids. They had taken Hank Carmichael. Stu Redman. God alone knew how many others. Vic had been scared and indignant. Sure, he had the snuffles and sneezes, but he surely wasn’t coming down with cholera or whatever it was that poor man Campion and his family had had. He’d been running a low-grade fever, too, and he remembered that Norm Bruett had stumbled and needed help getting up the steps to the plane. His wife had been scared, crying, and little Bobby Bruett had been crying too—crying and coughing. A raspy, croupy cough. The plane had been at the small landing strip outside of Braintree, but to get beyond the Arnette town limits they had had to pass a roadblock on US 93, and men had been stringing bobwire… stringing bobwire right out into the desert…

A red light flashed on over the strange door. There was a hissing sound, then a sound like a pump running. When it kicked off, the door opened. The man who came in was dressed in a huge white pressure suit with a transparent faceplate. Behind the faceplate, the man’s head bobbed like a balloon enclosed in a capsule. There were pressure tanks on his back, and when he spoke, his voice was metallic and clipped, devoid of all human quality. It might have been a voice coming from one of those video games, like the one that said “Try again, Space Cadet” when you fucked up your last go.

It rasped: “How are you feeling, Mr. Palfrey?”

But Vic couldn’t answer. Vic had gone back down into the green depths. It was his mamma he saw behind the faceplate of the white-suit. Mamma had been dressed in white when Poppa took him and George to see her for the last time in the sanny-tarium. She had to go to the sanny-tarium so everybody else in the fambly wouldn’t catch what she had. TB was catching. You could die.

He talked to his mamma… said he would be good and put in the horse… told her George had taken the funnies… asked her if she felt better… asked her if she thought she would be home soon… and the man in the white-suit gave him a shot and he sank deeper and his words became incoherent. The man in the white-suit glanced back at the faces behind the glass wall and shook his head.

He clicked an intercom switch inside his helmet with his chin and said, “If this one doesn’t work, we’ll lose him by midnight.”

For Vic Palfrey, magic hour was over.

“Just roll up your sleeve, Mr. Redman,” the pretty nurse with the dark hair said. “This won’t take a minute.” She was holding the blood pressure cuff in two gloved hands. Behind the plastic mask she was smiling as if they shared an amusing secret.

“No,” Stu said.

The smile faltered a little. “It’s only your blood pressure. It won’t take a minute.”

“No.”

“Doctor’s orders,” she said, becoming businesslike. “Please.”

“If it’s doctor’s orders, let me talk to the doctor.”

“I’m afraid he’s busy right now. If you’ll just—”

“I’ll wait,” Stu said equably, making no move to unbutton the cuff of his shirtsleeve.

“This is only my job. You don’t want me to get in trouble, do you?” This time she gave him a charming-waif smile. “If you’ll only let me—”

“I won’t,” Stu said. “Go back and tell them. They’ll send somebody.”

Looking troubled, the nurse went across to the steel door and turned a square key in a lockplate. The pump kicked on, the door shooshed open, and she stepped through. As it closed, she gave Stu a final reproachful look. Stu gazed back blandly.

When the door was closed, he got up and went restlessly to the window—double-paned glass and barred on the outside—but it was full dark now and there was nothing to see. He went back and sat down. He was wearing faded jeans and a checked shirt and his brown boots with the stitching beginning to bulge up the sides. He ran a hand up the side of his face and winced disapprovingly at the prickle. They wouldn’t let him shave, and he haired up fast.

He had no objection to the tests themselves. What he objected to was being kept in the dark, kept scared. He wasn’t sick, at least not yet, but scared plenty. There was some sort of snow job going on here, and he wasn’t going to be a party to it anymore until somebody told him something about what had happened in Arnette and what that fellow Campion had to do with it. At least then he could base his fears on something solid.

They had expected him to ask before now, he could read it in their eyes. They had certain ways of keeping things from you in hospitals. Four years ago his wife had died of cancer at the age of twenty-seven, it had started in her womb and then just raced up through her like wildfire, and Stu had observed the way they got around her questions, either by changing the subject or giving her information in large, technical lumps. So he simply hadn’t asked, and he could see it had worried them. Now it was time to ask, and he would get some answers. In words of one syllable.

He could fill in some of the blank spots on his own. Campion and his wife and child had something pretty bad. It hit you like the flu or a summer cold, only it kept on getting worse, presumably until you choked to death on your own snot or until the fever burned you down. It was highly contagious.

They had come and got him on the afternoon of the seventeenth, two days ago. Four army men and a doctor. Polite but firm. There was no question of declining; all four of the army men had been wearing sidearms. That was when Stu Redman started being seriously scared.

There had been a regular caravan going out of Arnette and over to the airstrip in Braintree. Stu had been riding with Vic Palfrey, Hap, the Bruetts, Hank Carmichael and his wife, and two army non-coins. They were all crammed into an army station wagon, and the army guys wouldn’t say aye, nay, or maybe no matter how hysterical Lila Bruett got.

The other wagons were crammed, too. Stu hadn’t seen all the people in them, but he had seen all five of the Hodges family, and Chris Ortega, brother of Carlos, the volunteer ambulance driver. Chris was the bartender down at the Indian Head. He had seen Parker Nason and his wife, the elderly people from the trailer park near Stu’s house. Stu guessed that they had netted up everyone who had been in the gas station and everyone that the people from the gas station said they’d talked to since Campion crashed into the pumps.

At the town limits there had been two olive-green trucks blocking the road. Stu guessed the other roads going into Arnette were most likely blocked off, too. They were stringing barbed wire, and when they had the town fenced off they would probably post sentries.

So it was serious. Deadly serious.

He sat patiently in the chair by the hospital bed he hadn’t had to use, waiting for the nurse to bring someone. The first someone would most likely be no one. Maybe by morning they would finally send in a someone who would have enough authority to tell him the things he needed to know. He could wait. Patience had always been Stuart Redman’s strong suit.

For something to do, he began to tick over the conditions of the people who had ridden to the airstrip with him. Norm had been the only obvious sick one. Coughing, bringing up phlegm, feverish. The rest seemed to be suffering to a greater or lesser degree from the common cold. Luke Bruett was sneezing. Lila Bruett and Vic Palfrey had mild coughs. Hap had the sniffles and kept blowing his nose. They hadn’t sounded much different from the first– and second-grade classes Stu remembered attending as a little boy, when at least two thirds of the kids present seemed to have some kind of a bug.

But the thing that scared him most of all—and maybe it was only coincidence—was what had happened just as they were turning onto the airstrip. The army driver had let out three sudden bellowing sneezes. Probably just coincidence. June was a bad time in east-central Texas for people with allergies. Or maybe the driver was just coming down with a common, garden-variety cold instead of the weird shit the rest of them had. Stu wanted to believe that. Because something that could jump from one person to another that quickly…

Their army escort had boarded the plane with them. They rode stolidly, refusing to answer any questions except as to their destination. They were going to Atlanta. They would be told more there (a bald-faced lie). Beyond that, the army men refused to say.

Hap had been sitting next to Stu on the flight, and he was pretty well sloshed. The plane was army too, strictly functional, but the booze and the food had been first-class airline stuff. Of course, instead of being served by a pretty stewardess, a plank-faced sergeant took your order, but if you could overlook that, you could get along pretty well. Even Lila Bruett had calmed down with a couple of grasshoppers in her.

Hap leaned close, bathing Stu in a warm mist of Scotch fumes. “This is a pretty funny bunch of ole boys, Stuart. Ain’t one of em under fifty, nor one with a weddin ring. Career boys, low rank.”

About half an hour before they touched down, Norm Bruett had some kind of a fainting spell and Lila began to scream. Two of the hard-faced stewards bundled Norm into a blanket and brought him around in fairly short order. Lila, no longer calm, continued to scream. After a while she threw up her grasshoppers and the chicken salad sandwich she had eaten. Two of the good ole boys went expressionlessly about the job of cleaning it up.

“What is all this?” Lila screamed. “What’s wrong with my man? Are we going to die? Are my babies going to die?” She had one “baby” in a headlock under each arm, their heads digging into her plentiful breasts. Luke and Bobby looked frightened and uncomfortable and rather embarrassed at the fuss she was making. “Why won’t somebody answer me? Isn’t this America?”

“Can’t somebody shut her up?” Chris Ortega had grumbled from the back of the plane. “Christly woman’s worse’n a jukebox with a broken record inside it.”

One of the army men had forced a glass of milk on her and Lila did shut up. She spent the rest of the ride looking out the window at the countryside passing far below and humming. Stu guessed there had been more than milk in that glass.

When they touched down, there had been four Cadillac limousines waiting for them. The Arnette folks got into three of them. Their army escort had gotten into the fourth. Stu guessed that those good old boys with no wedding rings—or close relatives, probably—were now somewhere right in this building.

The red light went on over his door. When the compressor or pump or whatever it was had stopped, a man in one of the white spacesuits stepped through. Dr. Denninger. He was young. He had black hair, olive skin, sharp features, and a mealy mouth.

“Patty Greer says you gave her some trouble,” Denninger’s chest-speaker said as he clopped over to Stu. “She’s quite upset.”

“No need for her to be,” Stu said easily. It was hard to sound easy, but he felt it was important to hide his fear from this man. Denninger looked and acted like the kind of man who would ride his help and bullyrag them around but lick up to his superiors like an egg-suck dog. That kind of man could be pushed a ways if he thought you held the whip hand. But if he smelled fear on you, he would hand you the same old cake: a thin icing of “I’m sorry I can’t tell you more” on top and a lot of contempt for stupid civilians who wanted to know more than what was good for them underneath.

“I want some answers,” Stu said.

“I’m sorry, but—”

“If you want me to cooperate, give me some answers.”

“In time you will be—”

“I can make it hard for you.”

“We know that,” Denninger said peevishly. “I simply don’t have the authority to tell you anything, Mr. Redman. I know very little myself.”

“I guess you’ve been testing my blood. All those needles.”

“That’s right,” Denninger said warily.

“What for?”

“Once more, Mr. Redman, I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” The peevish tone was back again, and Stu was inclined to believe him. He was nothing but a glorified technician on this job, and he didn’t like it much.

“They put my home town under quarantine.”

“I know nothing about that, either.” But Denninger cut his eyes away from Stu’s and this time Stu thought he was lying.

“How come I haven’t seen anything about it?” He pointed to the TV set bolted to the wall.

“I beg your pardon?”

“When they roadblock off a town and put bobwire around it, that’s news,” Stu said.

“Mr. Redman, if you’ll only let Patty take your blood pressure—”

“No. If you want any more from me, you better send two big strong men to get it. And no matter how many you send, I’m gonna try to rip some holes in those germ-suits. They don’t look all that strong, you know it?”

He made a playful grab at Denninger’s suit, and Denninger skipped backward and nearly fell over. The speaker of his intercom emitted a terrified squawk and there was a stir behind the double glass.

“I guess you could feed me something in my food to knock me out, but that’d mix up your tests, wouldn’t it?”

“Mr. Redman, you’re not being reasonable!” Denninger was keeping a prudent distance away. “Your lack of cooperation may do your country a grave disservice. Do you understand me?”

“Nope,” Stu said. “Right now it looks to me like it’s my country doing me a grave disservice. It’s got me locked up in a hospital room in Georgia with a buttermouth little pissant doctor who doesn’t know shit from Shinola. Get your ass out of here and send somebody in to talk to me or send enough boys to take what you need by force. I’ll fight em, you can count on that.”

He sat perfectly still in his chair after Denninger left. The nurse didn’t come back. Two strong orderlies did not appear to take his blood pressure by force. Now that he thought about it, he supposed that even such a small thing as a blood-pressure reading wouldn’t be much good if obtained under duress. For the time being they were leaving him to simmer in his own juices.

He got up and turned on the TV and watched it unseeingly. His fear was big inside him, a runaway elephant. For two days he had been waiting to start sneezing, coughing, hawking black phlegm and spitting it into the commode. He wondered about the others, people he had known all his life. He wondered if any of them were as bad off as Campion had been. He thought of the dead woman and her baby in that old Chevy, and he kept seeing Lila Bruett’s face on the woman and little Cheryl Hodges’s face on the baby.

The TV squawked and crackled. His heart beat slowly in his chest. Faintly, he could hear the sound of an air purifier sighing air into the room. He felt his fear twisting and turning inside him beneath his poker face. Sometimes it was big and panicky, trampling everything: the elephant. Sometimes it was small and gnawing, ripping with sharp teeth: the rat. It was always with him.

But it was forty hours before they sent him a man who would talk…

Chapter 8

On June 18, five hours after he had talked to his cousin Bill Hapscomb, Joe Bob Brentwood pulled down a speeder on Texas Highway 40 about twenty-five miles east of Arnette. The speeder was Harry Trent of Braintree, an insurance man. He had been doing sixty-five miles per in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. Joe Bob gave him a speeding ticket. Trent accepted it humbly and then amused Joe Bob by trying to sell him insurance on his house and his life. Joe Bob felt fine; dying was the last thing on his mind. Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons.

Harry, a gregarious man who liked his job, passed the sickness to more than forty people during that day and the next. How many those forty passed it to is impossible to say—you might as well ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. If you were to make a conservative estimate of five apiece, you’d have two hundred. Using the same conservative formula, one could say those two hundred went on to infect a thousand, the thousand five thousand, the five thousand twenty -five thousand.

Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers’ money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.

On June 19, the day Larry Underwood came home to New York and the day that Frannie Goldsmith told her father about her impending Little Stranger, Harry Trent stopped at an East Texas café called Babe’s Kwik-Eat for lunch. He had the cheeseburger platter and a piece of Babe’s delicious strawberry pie for dessert. He had a slight cold, an allergy cold, maybe, and he kept sneezing and having to spit. In the course of the meal he infected Babe, the dishwasher, two truckers in a corner booth, the man who came in to deliver bread, and the man who came in to change the records on the juke. He left the sweet thang that waited his table a dollar tip that was crawling with death.

On his way out, a station wagon pulled in. There was a roofrack on top, and the wagon was piled high with kids and luggage. The wagon had New York plates and the driver, who rolled down his window to ask Harry how to get to US 21 going north, had a New York accent. Harry gave the New York fellow very clear directions on how to get to Highway 21. He also served him and his entire family their death-warrants without even knowing it.

The New Yorker was Edward M. Norris, lieutenant of police, detective squad, in the Big Apple’s 87th Precinct. This was his first real vacation in five years. He and his family had had a fine time. The kids had been in seventh heaven at Disney World in Orlando, and not knowing the whole family would be dead by the second of July, Norris planned to tell that sour sonofabitch Steve Carella that it was possible to take your wife and kids someplace by car and have a good time. Steve, he would say, you may be a fine detective, but a man who can’t police his own family ain’t worth a pisshole drilled in a snowbank.

The Norris family had a kwik-eat at Babe’s, then followed Harry Trent’s admirable directions to Highway 21. Ed and his wife Trish marveled over southern hospitality while the three kids colored in the back seat. Christ only knew, Ed thought, what Carella’s pair of monsters would have been up to.

That night they stayed in a Eustace, Oklahoma, travel court. Ed and Trish infected the clerk. The kids, Marsha, Stanley, and Hector, infected the kids they played with on the tourist court’s playground—kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee. Trish infected the two women who were washing clothes at the Laundromat two blocks away. Ed, on his way down the motel corridor to get some ice, infected a fellow he passed in the hallway. Everybody got into the act.

Trish woke Ed up in the early morning hours to tell him that Heck, the baby, was sick. He had an ugly, rasping cough and was running a fever. It sounded to her like the croup. Ed Norris groaned and told her to give the kid some aspirin. If the kid’s goddam croup could only have held off another four or five days, he could have had it in his very own house and Ed would have been left with the memory of a perfect vacation (not to mention the anticipation of all that gloating he planned to do). He could hear the poor kid through the connecting door, hacking away like a hound dog.

Trish expected that Hector’s symptoms would abate in the morning—croup was a lying-down sickness—but by noon of the twentieth, she admitted to herself that it wasn’t happening. The aspirin wasn’t controlling the fever; poor Heck was just glass-eyed with it. His cough had taken on a booming note she didn’t like, and his respiration sounded labored and phlegmy. Whatever it was, Marsha seemed to be coming down with it, too, and Trish had a nasty little tickle in the back of her own throat that was making her cough, although so far it was only a light cough she could smother in a small hankie.

“We’ve got to get Heck to a doctor,” she said finally.

Ed pulled into a service station and checked the map paperclipped to the station wagon’s sun-visor. They were in Hammer Crossing, Kansas. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we can at least find a doctor who’ll give us a referral.” He sighed and ran an aggravated hand through his hair. “Hammer Crossing, Kansas! Jesus! Why’d he have to get sick, enough to need a doctor at some goddam nothing place like this?”

Marsha, who was looking at the map over her father’s shoulder, said: “It says Jesse James robbed the bank here, Daddy. Twice.”

“Fuck Jesse James,” Ed grumped. “Ed!” Trish cried. “Sorry,” he said, not feeling sorry in the least. He drove on.

After six calls, during each of which Ed Norris carefully held his temper with both hands, he finally found a doctor in Polliston who would look at Hector if they could get him there by three. Polliston was off their route, twenty miles west of Hammer Crossing, but now the important thing was Hector. Ed was getting very worried about him. He’d never seen the kid with so little oomph in him.

They were waiting in the outer office of Dr. Brenden Sweeney by two in the afternoon. By then Ed was sneezing, too. Sweeney’s waiting room was full; they didn’t get in to see the doctor until nearly four o’clock. Trish couldn’t rouse Heck to more than a sludgy semiconsciousness, and she felt feverish herself. Only Stan Norris, age nine, still felt good enough to fidget.

During their wait in Sweeney’s office they communicated the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips to more than twenty-five people, including a matronly woman who just came in to pay her bill before going on to pass the disease to her entire bridge club.

This matronly woman was Mrs. Robert Bradford, Sarah Bradford to the bridge club, Cookie to her husband and close friends. Sarah played well that night, possibly because her partner was Angela Dupray, her best friend. They seemed to enjoy a happy kind of telepathy. They won all three rubbers resoundingly, making a grand slam during the last. For Sarah, the only fly in the ointment was that she seemed to be coming down with a slight cold. It wasn’t fair, arriving so soon on the heels of the last one.

She and Angela went out for a quiet drink in a cocktail bar after the party broke up at ten. Angela was in no hurry to get home. It was David’s turn to have the weekly poker game at their house, and she just wouldn’t be able to sleep with all that noise going on… unless she had a little self-prescribed sedative first, which in her case would be two sloe gin fizzes.

Sarah had a Ward 8 and the two women rehashed the bridge game. In the meantime they managed to infect everyone in the Polliston cocktail bar, including two young men drinking beer nearby. They were on their way to California—just as Larry Underwood and his friend Rudy Schwartz had once gone—to seek their fortunes. A friend of theirs had promised them jobs with a moving company. The next day they headed west, spreading the disease as they went.

Chain letters don’t work. It’s a known fact. The million dollars or so you are promised if you’ll just send one single dollar to the name at the top of the list, add yours to the bottom, and then send the letter on to five friends never arrives. This one, the Captain Trips chain letter, worked very well. The pyramid was indeed being built, not from the bottom up but from the tip down—said tip being a deceased army security guard named Charles Campion. All the chickens were coming home to roost. Only instead of the mailman bringing each participant bale after bale of letters, each containing a single dollar bill, Captain Trips brought bales of bedrooms with a body or two in each one, and trenches, and dead-pits, and finally bodies slung into the oceans on each coast and into quarries and into the foundations of unfinished houses. And in the end, of course, the bodies would rot where they fell.

Sarah Bradford and Angela Dupray walked back to their parked cars together (infecting four or five people they met on the street), then pecked cheeks and went their separate ways. Sarah went home to infect her husband and his five poker buddies and her teenaged daughter, Samantha. Unknown to her parents, Samantha was terribly afraid she had caught a dose of the clap from her boyfriend. As a matter of fact, she had. As a further matter of fact, she had nothing to worry about; next to what her mother had given her, a good working dose of the clap was every bit as serious as a little eczema of the eyebrows.

The next day Samantha would go on to infect everybody in the swimming pool at the Polliston YWCA.

And so on.

Chapter 9

They set on him sometime after dusk, while he was walking up the shoulder of US Route 27, which was called Main Street a mile back, where it passed through town. A mile or two farther on, he had been planning to turn west on 63, which would have taken him to the turnpike and the start of his long trip north. His senses had been dulled, maybe, by the two beers he had just downed, but he had known something was wrong. He was just getting around to remembering the four or five heavyset townies down at the far end of the bar when they broke cover and ran at him.

Nick put up the best fight he could, decking one of them and bloodying another’s nose—breaking it, too, by the sound. For one or two hopeful moments he thought there was actually a chance that he might win. The fact that he fought without making any sound at all was unnerving them a little. They were soft, maybe they had done this before with no trouble, and they certainly hadn’t expected a serious fight from this skinny kid with the knapsack.

Then one of them caught him just over the chin, shredding his lower lip with some sort of a school ring, and the warm taste of blood gushed into his mouth. He stumbled backward and someone pinned his arms. He struggled wildly and got one hand free just as a fist looped down into his face like a runaway moon. Before it closed his right eye, he saw that ring again, glittering dully in the starlight. He saw stars and felt his consciousness start to diffuse, drifting away into parts unknown.

Scared, he struggled harder. The man wearing the ring was back in front of him now and Nick, afraid of being cut again, kicked him in the belly. School Ring’s breath went out of him and he doubled over, making a series of breathless whoofing sounds, like a terrier with laryngitis.

The others closed in. To Nick they were only shapes now, beefy men—good old boys, they called themselves—in gray shirts with the sleeves rolled up to show their big sunfreckled biceps. They wore blocky workshoes. Tangles of oily hair fell over their brows. In the last fading light of day all of this began to seem like a malign dream. Blood ran in his open eye. The knapsack was torn from his back. Blows rained down on him and he became a boneless, jittering puppet on a fraying string. Consciousness would not quite desert him. The only sounds were their out-of-breath gasps as they pistoned their fists into him and the liquid twitter of a nightjar in the deep stand of pine close by.

School Ring had staggered to his feet. “Hold im,” he said. “Hold im by the har.”

Hands grasped his arms. Somebody else twined both hands into Nick’s springy black hair.

“Why don’t he yell out?” one of the others asked, agitated. “Why don’t he yell out, Ray?”

“I tole you not to use any names,” Signet Ring said. “I don’t give a fuck why he don’t yell out. I’m gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me. Goddam dirty-fighter, that’s what he is.”

The fist looped down. Nick jerked his head aside and the ring furrowed his cheek.

“Hold im, I tole you,” Ray said. “What are y’all? Bunch of pussies?”

The fist looped down again and Nick’s nose became a squashed and dripping tomato. His breath clogged to a snuffle. Consciousness was down to a narrow pencil beam. His mouth dropped open and he scooped in night air. The nightjar sang again, sweet and solus. Nick heard it this time no more than he had the last.

“Hold im,” Ray said. “Hold im, goddammit.”

The fist looped down. Two of his front teeth shattered as the school ring snowplowed through them. It was an agony he couldn’t scream about. His legs unhinged and he sagged, held like a grainsack now by the hands behind him.

“Ray, that’s enough! You wanna kill im?”

“Hold im. Sucker kicked me. I’m gonna mess im up.” Then lights were splashing down the road, which was bordered here by underbrush and interlaced with huge old pines.

“Oh, Jesus!”

“Dump im, dump im!”

That was Ray’s voice, but Ray was no longer in front of him. Nick was dimly grateful, but most of what little consciousness he had left was taken up with the agony in his mouth. He could taste flecks of his teeth on his tongue.

Hands pushed him, propelling him out into the center of the road. Oncoming circles of light pinned him there like an actor on a stage. Brakes screamed. Nick pinwheeled his arms and tried to make his legs go but his legs wouldn’t oblige; they had given him up for dead. He collapsed on the composition surface and the screaming sound of brakes and tires filled the world as he waited numbly to be run over. At least it would put an end to the pain in his mouth.

Then a splatter of pebbles struck his cheek and he was looking at a tire which had come to a stop less than a foot from his face. He could see a small white rock embedded between two of the treads like a coin held between a pair of knuckles.

Piece of quartz, he thought disjointedly, and passed out.

When Nick came to, he was lying on a bunk. It was a hard one, but in the last three years or so he had lain on harder. He struggled his eyes open with great effort. They seemed gummed shut and the right one, the one that had been hit by the runaway moon, would only come to halfmast.

He was looking at a cracked gray cement ceiling. Pipes wrapped in insulation zigzagged beneath it. A large beetle was trundling busily along one of these pipes. Bisecting his field of vision was a chain. He raised his head slightly, sending a monstrous bolt of pain through it, and saw another chain running from the outside foot of the bunk to a bolt in the wall.

He turned his head to the left (another bolt of pain, this one not so killing) and saw a rough concrete wall. Cracks ran through it. It had been extensively written on. Some of the writing was new, some old, most illiterate. THIS PLACE HAS BUGS. LOUIS DRAGONSKY, 1987. I LIKE IT IN MY ASSHOLE. DTS CAN BE FUN. GEORGE RAMPLING IS A JERK-OFF. I STILL LOVE YOU SUZANNE. THIS PLACE SUX, JERRY. CLYDE D. FRED 1981. There were pictures of large dangling penises, gigantic breasts, crudely drawn vaginas. It all gave Nick a sense of place. He was in a jail cell.

Carefully, he propped himself on his elbows, let his feet (clad in paper slippers) drop over the edge of the cot, and then swung up to a sitting position. The large economy-size pain rocked his head again and his backbone gave out an alarming creak. His stomach rolled alarmingly in his gut, and a fainting kind of nausea seized him, the most dismaying and unmanning kind, the kind that makes you feel like crying out to God to make it stop.

Instead of crying out—he couldn’t have done that—Nick leaned over his knees, one hand on each cheek, and waited for it to pass. After a while, it did. He could feel the Band-Aids that had been placed over the furrow on his cheek, and by wrinkling that side of his face a couple of times he decided that some sawbones had sunk a couple of stitches in there for good measure.

He looked around. He was in a small cell shaped like a Saltine box stood on end. Beyond the end of the cot was a barred door. At the head of the cot was a lidless, ringless toilet. Behind and above him—he saw this by craning his stiff neck very, very carefully—was a small barred window.

After he had sat on the edge of the cot long enough to feel sure he wasn’t going to pass out, he hooked the shapeless gray pajama pants he was wearing down around his knees, squatted on the can, and urinated for what seemed at least an hour. When he was finished he stood up, holding on to the edge of the cot like an old man. He looked apprehensively into the bowl for signs of blood, but his urine had been clear. He flushed it away.

He walked carefully over to the barred door and looked out into a short corridor. To his left was the drunk tank. An old man was lying on one of its five bunks, a hand like driftwood dangling on the floor. To the right the corridor ended in a door that was chocked open. In the center of the corridor was a dangling green-shaded light like the kind he had seen in pool-halls.

A shadow rose, danced on the propped-open door, and then a large man in khaki suntans walked into the corridor. He was wearing a Sam Browne belt and a big pistol. He hooked his thumbs into his pants pockets and looked at Nick for almost a full minute without speaking. Then he said, “When I was a boy we caught ourselves a mountain lion up in the hills and shot it and then drug it twenty mile back to town over dirt hardpan. What was left of that creature when we got home was the sorriest-lookin sight I ever saw. You the second-sorriest, boy.”

Nick thought it had the feel of a prepared speech, care fully honed and treasured, saved for out-of-towners and vags that occupied the barred Saltine boxes from time to time.

“You got a name, Babalugah?”

Nick put a finger to his swelled and lacerated lips and shook his head. He put a hand over his mouth, then cut the air with it in a soft diagonal hashmark and shook his head again.

“What? Cain’t talk? What’s this happy horseshit?” The words were amiable enough, but Nick couldn’t follow tones or inflections. He plucked an invisible pen from the air and wrote with it.

“You want a pencil?”

Nick nodded.

“If you’re mute, how come you don’t have none of those cards?”

Nick shrugged. He turned out his empty pockets. He balled his fists and shadowboxed the air, which sent another bolt of pain through his head and another wave of nausea through his stomach. He finished by tapping his own temples lightly with his fists, rolling his eyes up, and sagging on the bars. Then he pointed to his empty pockets.

“You were robbed.”

Nick nodded.

The man in khaki turned away and went back into his office. A moment later he returned with a dull pencil and a notepad. He thrust them through the bars. Written across the top of each notesheet was MEMO and From The Desk Of Sheriff John Baker.

Nick turned the pad around and tapped the pencil eraser at the name. He raised questioning eyebrows.

“Yeah, that’s me. Who are you?”

“Nick Andros,” he wrote. He put his hand through the bars.

Baker shook his head. “I ain’t gonna shake with you. You deaf, too?”

Nick nodded.

“What happened to you tonight? Doc Soames and his wife almost ran you down like a woodchuck, boy.”

“Beat up & robbed. A mile or so from a rdhouse on Main St. Zack’s Place.”

“That hangout’s no place for a kid like you, Babalugah. You surely aren’t old enough to drink.”

Nick shook his head indignantly. “I’m twenty-two,” he wrote. “I can have a couple of beers without getting beaten up & robbed for them, can’t I?”

Baker read this with a sourly amused look on his face. “It don’t appear you can in Shoyo. What you doing here, kid?”

Nick tore the first sheet off the memo pad, crumpled it in a ball, dropped it on the floor. Before he could begin to write his reply, an arm shot through the bars and a steel hand clutched his shoulder. Nick’s head jerked up.

“My wife neatens these cells,” Baker said, “and I don’t see any need for you to litter yours up. Go throw that in the john.”

Nick bent over, wincing at the pain in his back, and fished the ball of paper off the floor. He took it over to the toilet, tossed it in, and then looked up at Baker with his eyebrows raised. Baker nodded.

Nick came back. This time he wrote longer, pencil flying over the paper. Baker reflected that teaching a deaf-mute kid to read and write was probably quite a trick, and this Nick Andros must have some pretty good equipment upstairs to have caught the hang of it. There were fellows here in Shoyo, Arkansas, who had never properly caught the hang of it, and more than a few of them hung out in Zack’s. But he supposed you couldn’t expect a kid who just blew into town to know that.

Nick handed the pad through the bars.

“I’ve been traveling around but I’m not a vag. Spent today working for a man named Rich Ellerton about 6 miles west of here. I cleaned his barn & put up a load of hay in his loft., Last week I was in Watts, Okla., running fence. The men who beat me up got my week’s pay.”

“You sure it was Rich Ellerton you was working for? I can check that, you know.” Baker had torn off Nick’s explanation, folded it to wallet-photo size, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

Nick nodded.

“You see his dog?”

Nick nodded.

“What kind was it?”

Nick gestured for the pad. “Big Doberman,” he wrote. “But nice. Not mean.”

Baker nodded, turned away, and went back into his office. Nick stood at the bars, watching anxiously. A moment later, Baker returned with a big keyring, unlocked the holding cell, and pushed it back on its track.

“Come on in the office,” Baker said. “You want some breakfast?”

Nick shook his head, then made pouring and drinking motions.

“Coffee? Got that. You take cream and sugar?”

Nick shook his head.

“Take it like a man, huh?” Baker laughed. “Come on.”

Baker started up the hallway, and although he was speaking, Nick was unable to hear what he was saying with his back turned and his lips hidden. “I don’t mind the company. I got insomnia. It’s got so I can’t sleep more’n three or four hours most nights. M’wife wants me to go see some big-shot doctor up in Pine Bluff. If it keeps on, I just might do it. I mean, looka this—here I am, five in the morning, not even light out, and there I sit eatin aigs and greazy home fries from the truck stop up the road.”

He turned on the last phrase and Nick caught “… truck stop up the road.” He raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders to indicate his puzzlement.

“Don’t matter,” Baker said. “Not to a young kid like you, anyway.”

In the outer office, Baker poured him a cup of black coffee out of a huge thermos. The sheriff’s half-finished breakfast plate stood on his desk blotter, and he pulled it back to himself. Nick sipped the coffee. It hurt his mouth, but it was good.

He tapped Baker on the shoulder, and when he looked up, Nick pointed to the coffee, rubbed his stomach, and winked soberly.

Baker smiled. “You better say it’s good. My wife Jane puts it up.” He tucked half a hard-fried egg into his mouth, chewed, and then pointed at Nick with his fork. “You’re pretty good. Just like one of those pantomimers. Bet you don’t have much trouble makin yourself understood, huh?”

Nick made a seesawing gesture with his hand in midair. Comme çi, comme ça.

“I ain’t gonna hold you,” Baker said, mopping up grease with a slice of toasted Wonder Bread, “but I tell you what. If you stick around, maybe we can get the guys who did this to you. You game?”

Nick nodded and wrote: “You think I can get my week’s pay back?”

“Not a chance,” Baker said flatly. “I’m just a hick sheriff, boy. For somethin like that, you’d be wantin Oral Roberts.”

Nick nodded and shrugged. Putting his hands together, he made a bird flying away.

“Yeah, like that. How many were there?”

Nick held up four fingers, shrugged, then held up five.

“Think you could identify any of them?”

Nick held up one finger and wrote: “Big & blond. Your size, maybe a little heavier. Gray shirt & pants. He was wearing a big ring. 3rd finger right hand. Purple stone. That’s what cut me.”

As Baker read this, a change came over his face. First concern, then anger. Nick, thinking the anger was directed against him, became frightened again.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Baker said. “This here’s a full commode slopping over for sure. You sure?”

Nick nodded reluctantly.

“Anything else? You see anything else?”

Nick thought hard, then wrote: “Small scar. On his forehead.”

Baker looked at the words. “That’s Ray Booth,” he said. “My brother-in-law. Thanks, kid. Five in the morning and my day’s wrecked already.”

Nick’s eyes opened a little wider, and he made a cautious gesture of commiseration.

“Well, all right,” Baker said, more to himself than to Nick. “He’s a bad actor. Janey knows it. He beat her up enough times when they was kids together. Still, they’re brother n sister and I guess I can forget my lovin for this week.”

Nick looked down, embarrassed. After a moment Baker shook his shoulder so—that Nick would see him speaking.

“It probably won’t do any good anyway,” he said. “Ray ‘n his jerk-off buddies’ll just swear each other up. Your word against theirs. Did you get any licks in?”

“Kicked this Ray in the guts,” Nick wrote. “Got another one in the nose. Might have broken it.”

“Ray chums around with Vince Hogan, Billy Warner, and Mike Childress, mostly,” Baker said. “I might be able to get Vince alone and break him down. He’s got all the spine of a dyin jellyfish. If I could get him I could go after Mike and Billy. Ray got that ring in a fraternity at LSU. He flunked out his sophomore year.” He paused, drumming his fingers against the rim of his breakfast plate. “I guess we could give it a go, kid, if you wanted to. But I’ll warn you in advance, we probably won’t get them. They’re as vicious and cowardly as a dogpack, but they’re town boys and you’re just a deaf-mute drifter. And if they got off, they’d come after you.”

Nick thought about it. In his mind he kept coming back to the image of himself, being shoved from one of them to the next like a bleeding scarecrow, and to Ray’s lips forming the words: I’m gonna mess im up. Sucker kicked me. To the feel of his knapsack, that old friend of the last two wandering years, being ripped from his back.

On the memo pad he wrote and underlined two words: “Let’s try.”

Baker sighed and nodded. “Okay. Vince Hogan works down to the sawmill… well, that ain’t just true. What he does mostly is fucks off down to the sawmill. We’ll take a ride down there about nine, if that’s fine with you. Maybe we can get him scared enough to spill the beans.”

Nick nodded.

“How’s your mouth? Doc Soames left some pills. He said it would probably be a misery to you.”

Nick nodded ruefully.

“I’ll get em. It…” He broke off, and in Nick’s silent movie world, he watched the sheriff explode several sneezes into his handkerchief. “That’s another thing,” he went on, but he had turned away now and Nick caught only the first word. “I’m comin down with a real good cold. Jesus Christ, ain’t life grand? Welcome to Arkansas, boy.”

He got the pills and came back to where Nick sat. After he passed them and a glass of water to Nick, Baker rubbed gently under the angle of his jaw. There was a definite painful swelling there. Swollen glands, coughing, sneezing, a low fever, felt like. Yeah, it was shaping up to be a wonderful day.

Chapter 10

Larry woke up with a hangover that was not too bad, a mouth that tasted as if a baby dragon had used it for a potty chair, and a feeling that he was somewhere he shouldn’t be.

The bed was a single, but there were two pillows on it. He could smell frying bacon. He sat up, looked out the windows at another gray New York day, and his first thought was that they had done something horrible to Berkeley overnight: turned it dirty and sooty, had aged it. Then last night began coming back and he realized he was looking at Fordham, not Berkeley. He was in a second-floor flat on Tremont Avenue, not far from the Concourse, and his mother was going to wonder where he had been last night. Had he called her, given her any kind of excuse, no matter how thin?

He swung his legs out of bed and found a crumpled pack of Winstons with one crazy cigarette left in it. He lit it with a green plastic Bic lighter. It tasted like dead horseshit. Out in the kitchen the sound of frying bacon went on and on, like radio static.

The girl’s name was Maria and she had said she was a… what? Oral hygienist, was that it? Larry didn’t know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral. He vaguely remembered being gobbled like a Perdue drumstick. Crosby, Stills, and Nash on the crappy little stereo in the living room, singing about how much water had gone underneath the bridge, time we had wasted on the way. If his memory was correct, Maria sure hadn’t wasted much time. She had been a little overwhelmed to discover he was that Larry Underwood. At one point in the evening’s festivities, hadn’t they gone out reeling around looking for an open record store so they could buy a copy of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”?

He groaned very softly and tried to retrace yesterday from its innocuous beginnings to its frantic, gobbling finale.

The Yankees weren’t in town, he remembered that. His mother had been gone to work when he woke up, but she had left a Yankees schedule on the kitchen table along with a note: “Larry. As you can see, the Yankees won’t be back until Jul 1. They are playing a doubleheader the 4th of July. If you’re not doing anything that day, why not take your mom to the ball park. I’ll buy the beer and hotdogs. There are eggs and sausage in the fridge or sweetrolls in the breadbox if you like them better. Take care of yourself kiddo.” There was a typical Alice Underwood PS: “Most of the kids you hung around with are gone now and good riddance to that bunch of hoods butt think Buddy Marx is working at that print shop on Stricker Avenue.”

Just thinking of that note was enough to make him wince. No “Dear” before his name. No “Love” before her signature. She didn’t believe in phony stuff. The real stuff was in the refrigerator. Sometime while he had been sleeping off his drive across America, she had gone out and stocked up on every goddam thing in the world that he liked. Her memory was so perfect it was frightening. A Daisy canned ham. Two pounds of real butter—how the hell could she afford that on her salary? Two six-packs of Coke. Deli sausages. A roast of beef already marinating in Alice’s secret sauce, the contents of which she refused to divulge even to her son, and a gallon of Baskin-Robbins Peach Delight ice cream in the freezer. Along with a Sara Lee cheesecake. The kind with strawberries on top.

On impulse, he had gone into the bathroom, not just to take care of his bladder but to check the medicine cabinet. A brand-new Pepsodent toothbrush was hanging in the old holder, where all of his childhood toothbrushes had hung, one after another. There was a package of disposable razors in the cabinet, a can of Barbaso shave cream, even a bottle of Old Spice cologne. Not fancy, she would have said—Larry could actually hear her—but smelly enough, for the money.

He had stood looking at these things, then had taken the new tube of toothpaste out and held it in his hand. No “Dear,” no “Love, Mom.” Just a new toothbrush, new tube of toothpaste, new bottle of cologne. Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind. He began brushing his teeth, wondering if there might not be a song in that someplace.

The oral hygienist came in, wearing a pink nylon half-slip and nothing else. “Hi, Larry,” she said. She was short, pretty in a vague Sandra Dee sort of way, and her breasts pointed at him perkily without a sign of a sag. What was the old joke? That’s right, Loot—she had a pair of 38s and a real gun. Ha-ha, very funny. He had come three thousand miles to spend the night being eaten alive by Sandra Dee.

“Hi,” he said, and got up. He was naked but his clothes were at the foot of the bed. He began to put them on.

“I’ve got a robe you can wear if you want to. We’re having kippers and bacon.”

Kippers and bacon? His stomach began to shrivel and fold in on itself.

“No, honey, I’ve got to run. Someone I’ve got to see.”

“Oh hey, you can’t just run out on me like that—”

“Really, it’s important.”

“Well, I’m impawtant, too!” She was becoming strident. It hurt Larry’s head. For no particular reason, he thought of Fred Flintstone bellowing “WIIILMAAA! ” at the top of his cartoon lungs.

“Your Bronx is showing, luv,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She planted her hands on her hips, the greasy spatula sticking out of one closed fist like a steel flower. Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn’t fetched. He stepped into his pants and buttoned them. “So I’m from the Bronx, does that make me black? What have you got against the Bronx? What are you, some kind of racist?”

“Nothing and I don’t think so,” he said, and walked over to her in his bare feet. “Listen, the somebody I have to meet is my mother. I just got into town two days ago and I didn’t call her last night or anything… did I?” he added hopefully.

“You didn’t call anybody,” she said sullenly. “I just bet it’s your mother.”

He walked back to the bed and stuck his feet in his loafers. “It is. Really. She works in the Chemical Bank Building. She’s a housekeeper. Well, these days I guess she’s a floor supervisor.”

“I bet you aren’t the Larry Underwood that has that record, either.”

“You believe what you want. I have to run.”

“You cheap prick!” she flashed at him. “What am I supposed to do with all the stuff I cooked?”

“Throw it out the window?” he suggested.

She uttered a high squawk of anger and hurled the spatula at him. On any other day of his life it would have missed. One of the first laws of physics was, to wit, a spatula will not fly a straight trajectory if hurled by an angry oral hygienist. Only this was the exception that proved the rule, flip-flop, up and over, smash, right into Larry’s forehead. It didn’t hurt much. Then he saw two drops of blood fall on the throw-rug as he bent over to pick the spatula up.

He advanced two steps with the spatula in his hand. “I ought to paddle you with this!” he shouted at her.

“Sure,” she said, cringing back and starting to cry. “Why not? Big star. Fuck and run. I thought you were a nice guy. You ain’t no nice guy.” Several tears ran down her cheeks, dropped from her jaw, and plopped onto her upper chest. Fascinated, he watched one of them roll down the slope of her right breast and perch on the nipple. It had a magnifying effect. He could see pores, and one black hair sprouting from the inner edge of the aureole. Jesus Christ, I’m going crazy, he thought wonderingly.

“I have to go,” he said. His white cloth jacket was on the foot of the bed. He picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.

“You ain’t no nice guy!” she cried at him as he went into the living room. “I only went with you because I thought you were a nice guy!”

The sight of the living room made him feel like groaning. On the couch where he dimly remembered being gobbled were at least two dozen copies of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” Three more were on the turntable of the dusty portable stereo. On the far wall was a huge poster of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw. Being gobbled means never having to say you’re sorry, ha-ha. Jesus, I am going crazy.

She stood in the bedroom doorway, still crying, pathetic in her half-slip. He could see a nick on one of her shins where she had cut herself shaving.

“Listen, give me a call,” she said. “I ain’t mad.”

He should have said, “Sure,” and that would have been the end of it. Instead he heard his mouth utter a crazy laugh and then, “Your kippers are burning.”

She screamed at him and started across the room, only to trip over a throw-pillow on the floor and go sprawling. One of her arms knocked over a half-empty bottle of milk and rocked the empty bottle of Scotch standing next to it. Holy God, Larry thought, were we mixing those?

He got out quickly and pounded down the stairs. As he went down the last six steps to the front door, he heard her in the upstairs hall, yelling down: “You ain’t no nice guy! You ain’t no —”

He slammed the door behind him and misty, humid warmth washed over him, carrying the aroma of spring trees and automobile exhaust. It was perfume after the smell of frying grease and stale cigarette smoke. He still had the crazy cigarette, now burned down to the filter, and he threw it into the gutter and took a deep breath of the fresh air. Wonderful to be out of that craziness. Return with us now to those wonderful days of normalcy as we—

Above and behind him a window went up with a rattling bang and he knew what was coming next.

“I hope you rot! ” she screamed down at him. The Compleat Bronx Fishwife. “I hope you fall in front of some fuckin subway train! You ain’t no singer! You’re shitty in bed! You louse! Pound this up your ass! Take this to ya mother, you louse! ”

The milk bottle came zipping down from her second-floor bedroom window. Larry ducked. It went off in the gutter like a bomb, spraying the street with glass fragments. The Scotch bottle came next, twirling end over end, to crash nearly at his feet. Whatever else she was, her aim was terrifying. He broke into a run, holding one arm over his head. This madness was never going to end.

From behind him came a final long braying cry, triumphant with juicy Bronx intonation: “KISS MY ASS, YOU CHEAP BAAASTARD! ” Then he was around the corner and on the expressway overpass, leaning over, laughing with a shaky intensity that was nearly hysteria, watching the cars pass below.

“Couldn’t you have handled that better?” he said, totally unaware he was speaking out loud. “Oh man, you coulda done better than that. That was a bad scene. Crap on that, man.” He realized he was speaking aloud, and another burst of laughter escaped him. He suddenly felt a dizzy, spinning nausea in his stomach and squeezed his eyes tightly closed. A memory circuit in the Department of Masochism clicked open and he heard Wayne Stukey saying, There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil.

He had treated the girl like an old whore on the morning after the frathouse gangbang.

You ain’t no nice guy.

I am. I am.

But when the people at the big party had protested his decision to cut them off, he had threatened to call the police, and he had meant it. Hadn’t he? Yes. Yes, he had. Most of them were strangers, true, he could care if they crapped on a landmine, but four or five of the protestors had gone back to the old days. And Wayne Stukey, that bastard, standing in the doorway with his arms folded like a hanging judge on the big day.

Sal Doria going out, saying: If this is what it does to guys like you, Larry, I wish you were still playing sessions.

He opened his eyes and turned away from the overpass, looking for a cab. Oh sure. The outraged friend bit. If Sal was such a big friend, what was he doing there sucking off him in the first place? I was stupid and nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up. That’s the real story.

You ain’t no nice guy.

“I am a nice guy,” he said sulkily. “And whose business is it, anyway?”

A cab was coming and Larry flagged it. It seemed to hesitate a moment before pulling up to the curb, and Larry remembered the blood on his forehead. He opened the back door and climbed in before the guy could change his mind.

“Manhattan. The Chemical Bank Building on Park,” he said.

The cab pulled out into traffic. “You got a cut on your forehead, guy,” the cabbie said.

“A girl threw a spatula at me,” Larry said absently.

The cabbie offered him a strange false smile of commiseration and drove on, leaving Larry to settle back and try to imagine how he was going to explain his night out to his mother.

Chapter 11

Larry found a tired-looking black woman on the lobby level who told him she thought Alice Underwood was up on the twenty-fourth floor, doing an inventory. He got an elevator and went up, aware that the other people in the car were stealing cautious glances at his forehead. The wound there was no longer bleeding, but it had caked over into an unsightly mess.

The twenty-fourth floor was taken up by the executive offices of a Japanese camera company. Larry walked up and down the halls for almost twenty minutes, looking for his mother and feeling like a horse’s ass. There were plenty of Occidental executives, but enough of them were Japanese to make him feel, at six-feet-two, like a very tall horse’s ass. The small men and women with the upslanted eyes looked at his caked forehead and bloody jacket sleeve with unsettling Oriental blandness.

He finally spotted a door with CUSTODIAN & HOUSEKEEPING on it behind a very large fern. He tried the knob. The door was unlocked and he peered inside. His mother was in there, dressed in her shapeless gray uniform, support hose, and crepe-soled shoes. Her hair was firmly caught under a black net. Her back was to him. She had a clipboard in one hand and seemed to be counting bottles of spray cleaner on a high shelf.

Larry felt a strong and guilty impulse to just turn tail and run. Go back to the garage two blocks from her apartment building and get the Z. Fuck the two months’ rent he had just laid down on the space. Just get in and boogie. Boogie where? Anywhere. Bar Harbor, Maine. Tampa, Florida. Salt Lake City, Utah. Any place would be a good place, as long as it was comfortably over the horizon from Dewey the Deck and from this soap-smelling little closet. He didn’t know if it was the fluorescent lights or the cut on his forehead, but he was getting one fuck of a headache.

Oh, quit whining, you goddam sissy.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

She started a little but didn’t turn around. “So, Larry. You found your way uptown.”

“Sure.” He shuffled his feet. “I wanted to apologize. I should have called you last night—”

“Yeah. Good idea.”

“I stayed with Buddy. We… uh… we went out steppin. Did the town.”

“I figured it was that. That or something like it.” She hooked a small stool over with her foot, climbed up on it, and began to count the bottles of floor-wax on the top shelf, touching each one lightly with the tips of her right thumb and forefinger as she went. She had to reach, and when she did, her dress pulled up and he could see beyond the brown tops of her stockings to the waffled white flesh of her upper thighs and he turned his eyes away, suddenly and aimlessly recalling what had happened to Noah’s third son when he looked at his father as the old man lay drunk and naked on his pallet. Poor guy had ended up being a hewer of wood and fetcher of water ever after. Him and all his descendants. And that’s why we have race riots today, son. Praise God.

“Is that all you came to tell me?” she asked, looking around at him for the first time.

“Well, where I was and to apologize. It was crummy of me to forget.”

“Yeah,” she said again. “But you got your crummy side to you, Larry. Did you think I forgot that?”

He flushed. “Mom, listen—”

“You’re bleeding. Some stripper hit you with a loaded G-string?” She turned back to the shelves, and after she had counted the whole row of bottles on the top one, she made a notation on her clipboard. “Someone has had themselves two bottles of floor-wax this past week,” she remarked. “Lucky them.”

“I came to say I was sorry! ” Larry told her loudly. She didn’t jump, but he did. A little.

“Yeah, so you said. Mr. Geoghan is gonna be on us like a ton of bricks if the damned floor-wax doesn’t stop going out.”

“I didn’t get in a barroom fight and I wasn’t in a strip-joint. It wasn’t anything like that. It was just…” He trailed off.

She turned around, eyebrows arched in that old sardonic way he remembered so well. “Was what?”

“Well…” He couldn’t think of a convincing lie quick enough. “It was. A. Uh. Spatula.”

“Someone mistook you for a fried egg? Must have been quite a night you and Buddy had out on the town.”

He kept forgetting that she could run rings around him, had always been able to, probably always would.

“It was a girl, Ma. She threw it at me.”

“She must be a hell of a shot,” Alice Underwood said, and turned away again. “That dratted Consuela is hiding the requisition forms again. Not that they do much good; we never get all the stuff we need, but we get plenty I wouldn’t know what to do with if my life depended on it.”

“Ma, are you mad at me?”

Her hands suddenly dropped to her sides. Her shoulders slumped.

“Don’t be mad at me,” he whispered. “Don’t be, okay? Huh?”

She turned around and he saw an unnatural sparkle in her eyes—well, he supposed it was natural enough, but it sure wasn’t caused by the fluorescents in here, and he heard the oral hygienist say once more, with great finality: You ain’t no nice guy. Why had he ever bothered to come home if he was going to do stuff like this to her… and never mind what she was doing to him.

“Larry,” she said gently. “Larry, Larry, Larry.”

For a moment he thought she was going to say no more; even allowed himself to hope this was so.

“Is that all you can say? ‘Don’t be mad at me, please, Ma, don’t be mad’? I hear you on the radio, and even though I don’t like that song you sing, I’m proud it’s you singing it. People ask me if that’s really my son and I say yes, that’s Larry. I tell them you could always sing, and that’s no lie, is it?”

He shook his head miserably, not trusting himself to speak.

“I tell them how you picked up Donny Roberts’s guitar when you were in junior high and how you were playing better than him in half an hour, even though he had lessons ever since second grade. You got talent, Larry, nobody ever had to tell me that, least of all you. I guess you knew it, too, because it’s the only thing I never heard you whine about. Then you went away, and am I beating you about the head and shoulders with that? No. Young men and young women, they go away. That’s the nature of the world. Sometimes it stinks, but it’s natural. Then you come back. Does somebody have to tell me why that is? No. You come back because, hit record or no hit record, you got in some kind of jam out there on the West Coast.”

“I’m not in any trouble!” he said indignantly.

“Yes you are. I know the signs. I’ve been your mother for a long time, and you can’t bullshit me, Larry. Trouble is something you have always looked around for when you couldn’t just turn your head and see it. Sometimes I think you’d cross the street to step in dogshit. God will forgive me for saying it, because God knows it’s true. Am I mad? No. Am I disappointed? Yes. I had hoped you would change out there. You didn’t. You went away a little boy in a man’s body and you came back the same way, except the man got his hair processed. You know why I think you came home?”

He looked at her, wanting to speak, but knowing the only thing he would be able to say if he did would make them both mad: Don’t cry, Mom, huh?

“I think you came home because you couldn’t think where else to go. You didn’t know who else would take you in. I never said a mean word about you to anyone else, Larry, not even to my own sister, but since you’ve pushed me to it, I’ll tell you exactly what I think of you. I think you’re a taker. You’ve always been one. It’s like God left some part of you out when He built you inside of me. You’re not bad, that’s not what I mean. Some of the places we had to live after your father died, you would have gone bad if there was bad in you, God knows. I think the worst thing I ever caught you doing was writing a nasty word in the downstairs hall of that place on Carstairs Avenue in Queens. You remember that?”

He remembered. She had chalked that same word on his forehead and then made him walk around the block with her three times. He had never written that word or any other word on a building, wall, or stoop.

“The worst part, Larry, is that you mean well. Sometimes I think it would almost be a mercy if you were broke worse. As it is, you seem to know what’s wrong but not how to fix it. And I don’t know how, either. I tried every way I knew when you were small. Writing that word on your forehead, that was only one of them… and by then I was getting desperate, or I never would have done such a mean thing to you. You’re a taker, that’s all. You came home to me because you knew that I have to give. Not to everybody, but to you.”

“I’ll move out,” he said, and every word was like spitting out a dry ball of lint. “This afternoon.”

Then it came to him that he probably couldn’t afford to move out, at least not until Wayne sent him his next royalty check—or whatever was left of it after he finished feeding the hungriest of the L.A. hounds—on to him. As for current out-of-pocket expenses, there was the rent on the parking slot for the Datsun Z, and a hefty payment he would have to send out by Friday, unless he wanted the friendly neighborhood repo man looking for him, and he didn’t. And after last night’s revel, which had begun so innocently with Buddy and his fiancée and this oral hygienist the fiancée knew, a nice girl from the Bronx, Larry, you’ll love her, great sense of humor, he was pretty low on cash. No. If you wanted to be accurate, he was busted to his heels. The thought made him panicky. If he left his mother’s now, where would he go? A hotel? The doorman at any hotel better than a fleabag would laugh his ass off and tell him to get lost. He was wearing good threads, but they knew. Somehow those bastards knew. They could smell an empty wallet.

“Don’t go,” she said softly. “I wish you wouldn’t, Larry. I bought some food special. Maybe you saw it. And I was hoping maybe we could play some gin rummy tonight.”

“Ma, you can’t play gin,” he said, smiling a little.

“For a penny a point, I can beat the tailgate off a kid like you.”

“Maybe if I gave you four hundred points—”

“Listen to the kid,” she jeered softly. “Maybe if I gave you four hundred. Stick around, Larry. What do you say?”

“All right,” he said. For the first time that day he felt good, really good. A small voice inside whispered he was taking again, same old Larry, riding for free, but he refused to listen. This was his mother, after all, and she had asked him. It was true that she had said some pretty hard things on the way to asking, but asking was asking, true or false? “Tell you what. I’ll pay for our tickets to the game on July fourth. I’ll just peel it off the top of whatever I skin you out of tonight.”

“You couldn’t skin a tomato,” she said amiably, then turned back to the shelves. “There’s a men’s down the hall. Why don’t you go wash the blood off your forehead? Then take ten dollars out of my purse and go to a movie. There’s some good movie-houses over on Third Avenue, still. Just stay out of those scum-pits around Forty-ninth and Broadway.”

“I’ll be giving money to you before long,” Larry said. “Record’s number eighteen on the Billboard chart this week. I checked it in Sam Goody’s coming over here.”

“That’s wonderful. If you’re so loaded, why didn’t you buy a copy, instead of just looking?”

Suddenly there was some kind of a blockage in his throat. He harrumphed, but it didn’t go away.

“Well, never mind,” she said. “My tongue’s like a horse with a bad temper. Once it starts running, it just has to go on running until it’s tired out. You know that. Take fifteen, Larry. Call it a loan. I guess I will get it back, one way or the other.”

“You will,” he said. He came over to her and tugged at the hem of her dress like a little boy. She looked down. He stood on tiptoe and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Ma.”

She looked startled, not at the kiss but either at what he had said or the tone in which he had said it. “Why, I know that, Larry,” she said.

“About what you said. About being in trouble. I am, a little, but it’s not—”

Her voice was cold and stern at once. So cold, in fact, that it frightened him a little. “I don’t want to hear about that.”

“Okay,” he said. “Listen, Ma—what’s the best theater around here?”

“The Lux Twin,” she said, “but I don’t know what’s playing there.”

“It doesn’t matter. You know what I think? There’s three things you can get everyplace in America, but you can only get them good in New York City.”

“Yeah, Mr. New York Times critic? What are those?”

“Movies, baseball, and hotdogs from Nedick’s.”

She laughed. “You ain’t stupid, Larry—you never were.”

So he went down to the men’s room. And washed the blood off his forehead. And went back and kissed his mother again. And got fifteen dollars from her scuffed black purse. And went to the movies at the Lux. And watched an insane, malignant revenant named Freddy Krueger suck a number of teenagers into the quicksand of their own dreams, where all but one of them—the heroine—died. Freddy Krueger also appeared to die at the end, but it was hard to tell, and since this movie had a Roman numeral after its name and seemed to be well attended, Larry thought the man with the razors on the tips of his fingers would be back, without knowing that the persistent sound in the row behind him signaled the end to all that: there would be no more sequels, and in a very short time, there would be no more movies at all.

In the row behind Larry, a man was coughing.

Chapter 12

There was a grandfather clock standing in the far corner of the parlor. Frannie Goldsmith had been listening to its measured ticks and tocks all of her life. It summed up the room, which she had never liked and, on days like today, actively hated.

Her favorite room in the place was her father’s workshop. It was in the shed that connected house and barn. You got there through a small door which was barely five feet high and nearly hidden behind the old kitchen woodstove. The door was good to begin with: small and almost hidden, it was deliciously like the sort of door one encountered in fairy-tales and fantasies. When she grew older and taller, she had to duck through it just as her father did—her mother never went out into the workshop unless she absolutely had to. It was an Alice in Wonderland door, and for a while her pretend game, secret even from her father, was that one day when she opened it, she would not find Peter Goldsmith’s workshop at all. Instead she would find an underground passageway leading somehow from Wonderland to Hobbiton, a low but somehow cozy tunnel with rounded earthen sides and an earthen ceiling interlaced with sturdy roots that would give your head a good bump if you knocked it against any of them. A tunnel that smelled not of wet soil and damp and nasty bugs and worms, but one which smelled of cinnamon and baking apple pies, one which ended somewhere up ahead in the pantry of Bag End, where Mr. Bilbo Baggins was celebrating his eleventy-first birthday party…

Well, that cozy tunnel never turned out to be there, but to the Frannie Goldsmith who had grown up in this house, the workshop (sometimes called “the toolshop” by her father and “that dirty place where your dad goes to drink beer” by her mother) had been enough. Strange, tools and odd gadgets. A huge chest with a thousand drawers, each of the thousand crammed full. Nails, screws, bits, sandpaper (of three kinds: rough, rougher, and roughest), planes, levels, and all the other things she’d had no name for then and still had no name for. It was dark in the workshop except for the cobwebby forty-watt bulb that hung down by its cord and the bright circle of light from the Tensor lamp that was always focused where her father was working. There were the smells of dust and oil and pipesmoke, and it seemed to her now that there should be a rule: every father must smoke. Pipe cigar, cigarette, marijuana, hash, lettuce leaves, something. Because the smell of smoke seemed an integral part of her own childhood.

“Hand me that wrench, Frannie. No—the little one. What did you do at school today?… She did?… Well why would Ruthie Sears want to push you down?… Yes, it is nasty: Very nasty scrape. But it goes good with the color of your dress, don’t you think? Now if you could only find Ruthie Sears and get her to push you down again and scrape the other leg. Then you’d have a pair. Hand me that big screwdriver, would you?… No, the one with the yellow handle.”

“Frannie Goldsmith! You come out of that nasty place right now and change your schoolclothes! RIGHT… NOW! You’ll be filthy! ”

Even now, at twenty-one, she could duck through that doorway and stand between his worktable and the old Ben Franklin stove that gave out such stuperous heat in the wintertime and catch some of what it had felt like to be such a small Frannie Goldsmith growing up in this house. It was an illusory feeling, almost always intermingled with sadness for her barely remembered brother Fred, whose own growing-up had been so rudely and finally interrupted. She could stand and smell the oil that was rubbed into everything, the must, the faint odor of her father’s pipe. She could rarely remember what it had been like to be so small, so strangely small, but out there she sometimes could, and it was a glad way to feel.

But the parlor, now.

The parlor.

If the workshop was the goodness of childhood, symbolized by the phantom smell of her father’s pipe (he sometimes puffed smoke gently into her ear when she had an earache, always after extracting a promise that she wouldn’t tell Carla, who would have had a fit), then the parlor was everything in childhood you wished you could forget. Speak when spoken to! Easier to break it than to fix it! Go right upstairs this minute and change your clothes, don’t you know that isn’t suitable? Don’t you ever think? Frannie, don’t pick at your clothes, people will think you have fleas. What must your Uncle Andrew and Aunt Carlene think? You embarrassed me half to death! The parlor was where you were tongue-tied, the parlor was where you itched and couldn’t scratch, the parlor was dictatorial commands, boring conversation, relatives pinching cheeks, aches, sneezes that couldn’t be sneezed, coughs that couldn’t be coughed, and above all, yawns that must not be yawned.

At the center of this room where her mother’s spirit dwelt was the clock. It had been built in 1889 by Carla’s grandfather, Tobias Downes, and it had ascended to family heirloom status almost immediately, shifting down through the years, carefully packed and insured for moves from one part of the country to another (it had originally come into being in the Buffalo, New York, workshop of Tobias, a place which had undoubtedly been every bit as smoky and nasty as Peter’s workshop, although such a comment would have struck Carla as completely irrelevant), sometimes shifting from one section of the family to another when cancer, heart attack, or accident pinched off some branch of the family tree. The clock had been in this parlor since Peter and Carla Goldsmith moved into the house some thirty-six years ago. Here it had been placed and here it had stayed, ticking and tocking, marking off segments of time in a dry age. Someday the clock would be hers, if she wanted, Frannie reflected as she looked into her mother’s white, shocked face. But I don’t want it! Don’t want it and won’t have it!

In this room there were dried flowers under glass bells. There was in this room a dove gray carpet with dusky pink roses figured into the nap. There was a graceful bow window that looked down the hill to Route 1, with a big privet hedge between the road and the grounds. Carla had nagged her husband with a grim fervor until he planted that hedge right after the Exxon station on the corner went up. Once it was in, she nagged her husband to make it grow faster. Even radioactive fertilizer, Frannie thought, would have been acceptable to her if it had served that end. The stridency of her remonstrations concerning the privet had lessened as the hedge grew taller, and she supposed it would stop altogether in another two years or so, when the hedge finally grew tall enough to blot out the offending gas station completely and the parlor was inviolate again.

It would stop on that subject, at least.

Stencils on the wallpaper, large green leaves and pink flowers almost the same shade as the roses in the carpet. Early American furniture and a dark mahogany set of double doors. A fireplace which was just for show where a birch log sat eternally on a hearth of red brick which was eternally immaculate and untouched by even a speck of soot. Frannie guessed that by now that log was so dry that it would burn like newspaper if lit. Above the log was a pot almost big enough for a child to bathe in. It had been handed down from Frannie’s great-grandmother, and it hung eternally suspended over the eternal log. Above the mantel, finishing that part of the picture, was The Eternal Flintlock Rifle.

Segments of time in a dry age.

One of her earliest memories was of peeing on the dove gray rug with the dusky pink roses figured into the nap. She might have been three, not trained for very long, and probably not allowed in the parlor save for special occasions because of the chance of accidents. But somehow she had gotten in, and seeing her mother not just running but sprinting to grab her up before the unthinkable could happen had brought the unthinkable on. Her bladder let go, and the spreading stain as the dove gray rug turned to a darker slate gray around her bottom had caused her mother to actually shriek. The stain had finally come out, but after how many patient shampooings? The Lord might know; Frannie Goldsmith did not.

It was in the parlor that her mother had talked to her, grimly, explicitly, and at length, after she caught Frannie and Norman Burstein examining each other in the barn, their clothes piled in one amicable heap on a haybale to one side. How would she like it, Carla asked as the grandfather clock solemnly ticked off segments of time in a dry age, if she took Frannie out for a walk up and down US Route 1 without any clothes on? How would that be? Frannie, then six, had cried, but had somehow managed to avoid the hysterics which impended at this prospect.

When she was ten she had ridden her bike into the mailbox post while looking back over her shoulder to yell something to Georgette McGuire. She cut her head, bloodied her nose, lacerated both knees, and had actually grayed out for a few moments with shock. When she came around she had stumbled up the driveway to the house, weeping and horrified at the sight of so much blood coming out of herself. She would have gone to her father, but since her father was at work, she had stumbled into the parlor where her mother was serving tea to Mrs. Venner and Mrs. Prynne. Get out! her mother had screamed, and the next moment she was running to Frannie, embracing her, crying Oh Frannie, oh dear, what happened, oh your poor nose! But she was leading Frannie back into the kitchen, where the floor could safely be bled upon, even as she was comforting her, and Frannie never forgot that her first two words that day hadn’t been Oh, Frannie! but Get out! Her first concern had been for the parlor, where that dry age went on and on and blood was not allowed. Perhaps Mrs. Prynne never forgot, either, because even through her tears Frannie had seen a shocked, slapped expression cross the woman’s face. After that day, Mrs. Prynne had become something of a seldom caller.

In her first year of junior high she had gotten a bad conduct mark on her report card, and of course she was invited into the parlor to discuss this mark with her mother. In her final year of senior high school, she had received three detention periods for passing notes, and that had likewise been discussed with her mother in the parlor. It was there that they discussed Frannie’s ambitions, which always ended up seeming a trifle shallow; it was there that they discussed Frannie’s hopes, which always ended up seeming a trifle unworthy; it was there that they discussed Frannie’s complaints, which always ended up seeming very much unwarranted, not to mention puling, whining, and ungrateful.

It was in the parlor that her brother’s coffin had stood on a trestle bedecked with roses, chrysanthemums, and lilies of the valley, their dry perfume filling the room while in the corner the poker-faced clock kept its place, ticking and tocking off segments of time in a dry age.

“You’re pregnant,” Carla Goldsmith repeated for the second time.

“Yes, Mother.” Her voice was very, dry but she would not allow herself to wet her lips. She pressed them together instead. She thought: In my father’s workshop there is a little girl in a red dress and she will always be there, laughing and hiding under the table with the vise clamped to one edge or all bundled up with her scabby knees clasped against her chest behind the big toolbox with its thousand drawers. That girl is a very happy girl. But in my mother’s parlor there is a much smaller girl who can’t help piddling on the rug like a bad dog. Like a bad little bitch puppy. And she will always be there, too, no matter how much I wish she would be gone.

“Oh-Frannie,” her mother said, her words coming very quick. She laid a hand against the side of her cheek like an offended maiden aunt. “How-did-it-happen?”

It was Jesse’s question. That was what really pissed her off; it was the same question he had asked.

“Since you had two kids yourself, Mother, I think you know how it happened.”

“Don’t be smart!” Carla cried. Her eyes opened wide and flashed the hot fire that had always terrified Frannie as a child. She was on her feet in the quick way she had (and that had also terrified her as a child), a tall woman with graying hair which was nicely upswept and tipped and generally beauty-shopped, a tall woman in a smart green dress and faultless beige hose. She went to the mantelpiece, where she always went in moments of distress. Resting there, below the flintlock, was a large scrapbook. Carla was something of an amateur genealogist, and her entire family was in that book… at least, as far back as 1638, when its earliest traceable progenitor had risen out of the nameless crowd of Londoners long enough to be recorded in some very old church records as Merton Downs, Freemason. Her family tree had been published four years ago in The New England Genealogist, with Carla herself the compiler of record.

Now she fingered that book of painstakingly amassed names, a safe ground where none could trespass. Were there no thieves in there anyplace? Frannie wondered. No alcoholics? No unwed mothers?

“How could you do something like this to your father and me?” she asked finally. “Was it that boy Jesse?”

“It was Jesse. Jesse’s the father.”

Carla flinched at the word.

“How could you do it?” Carla repeated. “We did our best to bring you up in the right way. This is just—just—”

She put her hands to her face and began to weep.

“How could you do it?” she cried. “After all we’ve done for you, this is the thanks we get? For you to go out and… and… rut with a boy like a bitch in heat? You bad girl! You bad girl!”

She dissolved into sobs, leaning against the mantelpiece for support, one hand over her eyes, the other continuing to slip back and forth over the green cloth cover of the scrapbook. Meantime, the grandfather clock went on ticking.

“Mother—”

“Don’t talk to me! You’ve said enough!”

Frannie stood up stiffly. Her legs felt like wood but must not be, because they were trembling. Tears were beginning to leak out of her own eyes, but let them; she would not let this room defeat her again. “I’ll be going now.”

“You ate at our table!” Carla cried at her suddenly. “We loved you… and supported you… and this is what we get for it! Bad girl! Bad girl!”

Frannie, blinded by tears, stumbled. Her right foot struck her left ankle. She lost her balance and fell down with her hands splayed out. She knocked the side of her head against the coffee table and one hand sent a vase of flowers pitching onto the rug. It didn’t break but water gurgled out, turning dove gray to slate gray.

“Look at that!” Carla screamed, almost in triumph. The tears had put black hollows under her eyes and cut courses through her makeup. She looked haggard and half-mad. “Look at that, you’ve spoiled the rug, your grandmother’s rug—”

She sat on the floor, dazedly rubbing her head, still crying, wanting to tell her mother that it was only water, but she was completely unnerved now, and not really sure. Was it only water? Or was it urine? Which?

Again moving with that spooky quickness, Carla Goldsmith snatched the vase up and brandished it at Frannie. “What’s your next move, miss? Are you planning to stay right here? Are you expecting us to feed you and board you while you sport yourself all around town? That’s it, I suppose. Well, no! No! I won’t have it. I will not have it! ”

“I don’t want to stay here,” Frannie muttered. “Did you think I would?”

“Where are you going to go? With him? I doubt it.”

“Bobbi Rengarten in Dorchester or Debbie Smith in Somersworth, I suppose.” Frannie slowly gathered herself together and got up. She was still crying but she was beginning to be mad, as well. “Not that it’s any business of yours.”

“No business of mine?” Carla echoed, still holding the vase. Her face was parchment white. “No business of mine? What you do when you’re under my roof is no business of mine? You ungrateful little bitch!”

She slapped Frannie, and slapped her hard. Frannie’s head rocked back. She stopped rubbing her head and started rubbing her cheek, looking unbelievingly at her mother.

“This is the thanks we get for seeing you into a nice school,” Carla said, showing her teeth in a merciless and frightful grin. “Now you’ll never finish. After you marry him—”

“I’m not going to marry him. And I’m not going to quit school.”

Carla’s eyes widened. She stared at Frannie as if Frannie had lost her mind. “What are you talking about? An abortion? Having an abortion? You want to be a murderer as well as a tramp?”

“I’m going to have the child. I’ll have to take the spring semester off, but I can finish next summer.”

“What do you think you’re going to finish on? My money? If that’s it, you’ve got a lot more thinking to do. A modern girl like you hardly needs support from her parents, does she?”

“Support I could use,” Frannie said softly. “The money… well, I’ll get by.”

“There’s not a bit of shame in you! Not a single thought for anyone but yourself!” Carla shouted. “My God, what this is going to do to your father and me! But you don’t care a bit! It will break your father’s heart, and—”

“It don’t feel so broken.” Peter Goldsmith’s calm voice came from the doorway, and they both swung around. In the doorway he was, but far back in it; the toes of his workboots stopped just short of the place where the parlor carpet took over from the shabbier one in the hallway. Frannie realized suddenly that it was a place she had seen him in a great many times before. When had he last actually been in the parlor? She couldn’t remember.

“What are you doing here?” Carla snapped, suddenly unmindful of any structural damage her husband’s heart might have sustained. “I thought you were working late this afternoon.”

“I switched off with Harry Masters,” Peter said. “Fran’s already told me, Carla. We are going to be grandparents.”

“Grandparents! ” she shrieked. An ugly, confused sort of laughter jarred out of her. “You leave this to me. She told you first and you kept it from me. All right. It’s what I’ve come to expect of you. But now I’m going to close the door and the two of us are going to thrash this out.”

She smiled with glittery bitterness at Frannie.

“Just… we ‘girls.’”

She put her hand on the knob of the parlor door and began to swing it closed. Frannie watched, still dazed, hardly able to comprehend her mother’s sudden gush of fury and vitriol.

Peter put his hand out slowly, reluctantly, and stopped the door halfway through its swing.

“Peter, I want you to leave this to me.”

“I know you do. I have in the past. But not this time, Carla.”

“This is not your province.”

Calmly, he replied: “It is.”

“Daddy—”

Carla turned on her, the parchment white of her face now tattooed red over the cheekbones. “Don’t you speak to him! ” she screamed. “He’s not the one you’re dealing with! I know you could always wheedle him around to any crazy idea you had or sweet-talk him into taking your side no matter what you did, but he is not the one you’re dealing with today, miss! ”

“Stop it, Carla.”

“Get out! ”

“I’m not in. You can see th—”

“Don’t you make fun of me! Get out of my parlor! ”

And with that she began to push the door, lowering her head and getting her shoulders into it until she looked like some strange bull, both human and female. He held her back easily at first, then with more effort. At last the cords stood out on his neck, although she was a woman and seventy pounds lighter than he.

Frannie wanted to scream at them to stop it, to tell her father to go away so the two of them wouldn’t have to look at Carla like this, at the sudden and irrational bitterness that had always seemed to threaten but which had now swept her up. But her mouth was frozen, its hinges seemingly rusted shut.

“Get out! Get out of my parlor! Out! Out! Out! You bastard, let go of the goddamned door and GET OUT! ”

That was when he slapped her.

It was a flat, almost unimportant sound. The grandfather clock did not fly into outraged dust at the sound, but went on ticking just as it had ever since it was set going. The furniture did not groan. But Carla’s raging words were cut off as if amputated with a scalpel. She fell on her knees and the door swung all the way open to bang softly against a high-backed Victorian chair with a hand-embroidered slipcover.

“No, oh no,” Frannie said in a hurt little voice.

Carla pressed a hand to her cheek and stared up at her husband.

“You have had that coming for ten years or better,” Peter remarked. His voice had a slight unsteadiness in it. “I always told myself I didn’t do it because I don’t hold with hitting women. I still don’t. But when a person—man or woman—turns into a dog and begins to bite, someone has to shy it off. I only wish, Carla, I’d had the guts to do it sooner. ‘Twould have hurt us both less.”

“Daddy—”

“Hush, Frannie,” he said with absent sternness, and she hushed.

“You say she’s being selfish,” Peter said, still looking down into his wife’s still, shocked face. “You’re the one doing that. You stopped caring about Frannie when Fred died. That was when you decided caring hurt too much and decided it’d be safer just to live for yourself. And this is where you came to do that, time and time and time again. This room. You doted on your dead family and forgot the part of it still living. And when she came in here and told you she was in trouble, asked for your help, I bet the first thing that crossed your mind was to wonder what the ladies in the Flower and Garden Club would say, or if it meant you’d have to stay away from Amy Lauder’s weddin. Hurt’s a reason to change, but all the hurt in the world don’t change facts. You have been selfish.”

He reached down and helped her up. She came to her feet like a sleepwalker. Her expression didn’t change; her eyes were still wide and unbelieving. Relentlessness hadn’t yet come back into them, but Frannie dully thought that in time it would.

It would.

“It’s my fault for letting you go on. For not wanting any unpleasantness. For not wanting to rock the boat. I was selfish, too, you see. And when Fran went off to school I thought, Well, now Carla can have what she wants and it won’t hurt nobody but herself, and if a person doesn’t know they’re hurting, why, maybe they’re not. I was wrong. I’ve been wrong before, but never as bad as this.” Gently, but with great force, he reached out and grasped Carla’s shoulders. “Now: I am telling you this as your husband. If Frannie needs a place to stay, this can be the place—same as it always was. If she needs money, she can have it from my purse—same as she always could. And if she decides to keep her baby, you will see that she has a proper baby shower, and you may think no one will come, but she has friends, good ones, and they will. I’ll tell you one more thing, too. If she wants it christened, it will be done right here. Right here in this goddamned parlor.”

Carla’s mouth had dropped open, and now a sound began to come from it. At first it sounded uncannily like the whistle of a teakettle on a hot burner. Then it became a keening wail.

“Peter, your own son lay in his coffin in this room! ”

“Yes. And that’s why I can’t think of a better place to christen a new life,” he said. “Fred’s blood. Live blood. Fred himself, he’s been dead a lot of years, Carla. He was worm-food long since.”

She screamed at that and put her hands to her ears. He bent down and pulled them away.

“But the worms haven’t got your daughter and your daughter’s baby. It don’t matter how it was got; it’s alive. You act like you want to drive her off, Carla. What will you have if you do? Nothing but this room and a husband who’ll hate you for what you did. If you do that, why, it might just as well have been all three of us that day—me and Frannie as well as Fred.”

“I want to go upstairs and lie down,” Carla said. “I feel nauseated. I think I’d better lie down.”

“I’ll help you,” Frannie said.

“Don’t you touch me. Stay with your father. You and he seem to have this all worked out. How you are going to destroy me in this town. Why don’t you just settle into my parlor, Frannie? Throw mud on the carpet, take ashes from the stove and throw them into my clock? Why not? Why not?”

She began to laugh and pushed past Peter, into the hall. She was listing like a drunken woman. Peter tried to put an arm around her shoulders. She bared her teeth and hissed at him like a cat.

Her laughter turned to sobs as she went slowly up the stairs, leaning on the mahogany banister for support; those sobs had a ripping, helpless quality that made Frannie want to scream and throw up at the same time. Her father’s face was the color of dirty linen. At the top, Carla turned and swayed so alarmingly that for a moment Frannie believed she would tumble all the way back down to the bottom. She looked at them, seemingly about to speak, then turned away again. A moment later, the closing of her bedroom door muted the stormy sound of her grief and hurt.

Frannie and Peter stared at each other, appalled, and the grandfather clock ticked calmly on.

“This will work itself out,” Peter said calmly. “She’ll come around.”

“Will she?” Frannie asked. She walked slowly to her father, leaned against him, and he put his arm around her. “I don’t think so.”

“Never mind. We won’t think about it for now.”

“I ought to go. She doesn’t want me here.”

“You ought to stay. You ought to be here when—if—she comes to and finds out she still needs you to stay.” He paused. “Me, I already do, Fran.”

“Daddy,” she said, and put her head against his chest. “Oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry, lust so goddam sorry—”

“Shhh,” he said, and stroked her hair. Over her head he could see the afternoon sunlight streaming duskily in through the bow windows, as it had always done, golden and still, the way sunlight falls into museums and the halls of the dead. “Shhh, Frannie; I love you. I love you.”

Chapter 13

The red light went on. The pump hissed. The door opened. The man who stepped through was not wearing one of the white all-over suits, but a small shiny nose-filter that looked a little bit like a two-pronged silver fork, the kind the hostess leaves on the canape table to get the olives out of the bottle.

“Hi, Mr. Redman,” he said, strolling across the room. He stuck out his hand, clad in a thin transparent rubber glove, and Stu, surprised into the defensive, shook it. “I’m Dick Deitz. Denninger said you wouldn’t play ball anymore unless somebody told you what the score was.”

Stu nodded.

“Good.” Deitz sat on the edge of the bed. He was a small brown man, and sitting there with his elbows cocked just above his knees, he looked like a gnome in a Disney picture. “So what do you want to know?”

“First, I guess I want to know why you’re not wearing one of those spacesuits.”

“Because Geraldo there says you’re not catching.” Deitz pointed to a guinea pig behind the double-paned window. The guinea pig was in a cage, and standing behind the cage was Denninger himself, his face expressionless.

“Geraldo, huh?”

“Geraldo’s been breathing your air for the last three days, via convector. This disease that your friends have passes easily from humans to guinea pigs and vice versa. If you were catching, we figure Geraldo would be dead by now.”

“But you’re not taking any chances,” Stu said dryly, and cocked a thumb at the nose-filter.

“That,” Deitz said with a cynical smile, “is not in my contract.”

“What have I got?”

Smoothly, as if rehearsed, Deitz said, “Black hair, blue eyes, one hell of a suntan…” He looked closely at Stu. “Not funny, huh?”

Stu said nothing.

“Want to hit me?”

“I don’t believe it would do any good.”

Deitz sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if the plugs going up the nostrils hurt. “Listen,” he said. “When things look serious, I do jokes. Some people smoke or chew gum. It’s the way I keep my shit together, that’s all. I don’t doubt there are lots of people who have better ways. As to what sort of disease you’ve got, well, so far as Denninger and his colleagues have been able to ascertain, you don’t have any at all.”

Stu nodded impassively. Yet somehow he had an idea this little gnome of a man had seen past his poker face to his sudden and deep relief.

“What have the others got?”

“I’m sorry, that’s classified.”

“How did that fellow Campion get it?”

“That’s classified, too.”

“My guess is that he was in the army. And there was an accident someplace. Like what happened to those sheep in Utah thirty years ago, only a lot worse.”

“Mr. Redman, I could go to jail just for telling you you were hot or cold.”

Stu rubbed a hand thoughtfully over his new scrub of beard.

“You should be glad we’re not telling you more than we are,” Deitz said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“So I can serve my country better,” Stu said dryly.

“No, that’s strictly Denninger’s thing,” Deitz said. “In the scheme of things both Denninger and I are little men, but Denninger is even littler than I am. He’s a servomotor, nothing more. There’s a more pragmatic reason for you to be glad. You’re classified, too, you know. You’ve disappeared from the face of the earth. If you knew enough, the big guys might decide that the safest thing would be for you to disappear forever.”

Stu said nothing. He was stunned.

“But I didn’t come here to threaten you. We want your cooperation very badly, Mr. Redman. We need it.”

“Where are the other people I came in here with?”

Deitz brought a paper out of an inside pocket. “Victor Palfrey, deceased. Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased.”

The names reeled in Stu’s head. Chris the bartender. He’d always kept a sawed-off, lead-loaded Louisville Slugger under the bar, and the trucker who thought Chris was just kidding about using it was apt to get a big surprise. Tony Leominster, who drove that big International with the Cobra CB under the dash. Sometimes hung around Hap’s station, but hadn’t been there the night Campion took out the pumps. Vic Palfrey… Christ, he had known Vic his whole life. How could Vic be dead? But the thing that hit him the hardest was the Hodges family.

“All of them?” he heard himself ask. “Ralph’s whole family?”

Deitz turned the paper over. “No, there’s a little girl. Eva. Four years old. She’s alive.”

“Well, how is she?”

“I’m sorry, that’s classified.”

Rage struck him with all the unexpectedness of a sweet surprise. He was up, and then he had hold of Deitz’s lapels, and he was shaking him back and forth. From the corner of his eye he saw startled movement behind the double-paned glass. Dimly, muffled by distance and soundproofed walls, he heard a hooter go off.

“What did you people do?” he shouted. “What did you do? What in Christ’s name did you do?”

“Mr. Redman—”

“Huh? What the fuck did you people do?”

The door hissed open. Three large men in olive-drab uniforms stepped in. They were all wearing nose-filters.

Deitz looked over at them and snapped, “Get the hell out of here!”

The three men looked uncertain.

“Our orders—”

“Get out of here and that’s an order!”

They retreated. Deitz sat calmly on the bed. His lapels were rumpled and his hair had tumbled over his forehead. That was all. He was looking at Stu calmly, even compassionately. For a wild moment Stu considered ripping his nose-filter out, and then he remembered Geraldo, what a stupid name for a guinea pig. Dull despair struck him like cold water. He sat down.

“Christ in a sidecar,” he muttered.

“Listen to me,” Deitz said. “I’m not responsible for you being here. Neither is Denninger, or the nurses who come in to take your blood pressure. If there was a responsible party it was Campion, but you can’t lay it all on him, either. He ran, but under the circumstances, you or I might have run, too. It was a technical slipup that allowed him to run. The situation exists. We are trying to cope with it, all of us. But that doesn’t make us responsible.”

“Then who is?”

“Nobody,” Deitz said, and smiled. “On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it’s invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways.”

“Some accident,” Stu said, his voice nearly a whisper. “What about the others? Hap and Hank Carmichael and Lila Bruett? Their boy Luke? Monty Sullivan—”

“Classified,” Deitz said. “Going to shake me some more? If it will make you feel better, shake away.”

Stu said nothing, but the way he was looking at Deitz made Deitz suddenly look down and begin to fiddle with the creases of his pants.

“They’re alive,” he said, “and you may see them in time.”

“What about Arnette?”

“Quarantined.”

“Who’s dead there?”

“Nobody.”

“You’re lying.”

“Sorry you think so.”

“When do I get out of here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Classified?” Stu asked bitterly.

“No, just unknown. You don’t seem to have this disease. We want to know why you don’t have it. Then we’re home free.”

“Can I get a shave? I itch.”

Deitz smiled. “If you’ll allow Denninger to start running his tests again, I’ll get an orderly in to shave you right now.”

“I can handle it. I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen.”

Deitz shook his head firmly. “I think not.”

Stu smiled dryly at him. “Afraid I might cut my own throat?”

“Let’s just say—”

Stu interrupted him with a series of harsh, dry coughs. He bent over with the force of them.

The effect on Deitz was galvanic. He was up off the bed like a shot and across to the airlock with his feet seeming not to touch the floor at all. Then he was fumbling in his pocket for the square key and ramming it into the slot.

“Don’t bother,” Stu said mildly. “I was faking.”

Deitz turned to him slowly. Now his face had changed. His lips were thinned with anger, his eyes staring. “You were what?”

“Faking,” Stu said. His smile broadened.

Deitz took two uncertain steps toward him. His fists closed, opened, then closed again. “But why? Why would you want to do something like that?”

“Sorry,” Stu said, smiling. “That’s classified.”

“You shit sonofabitch,” Deitz said with soft wonder.

“Go on. Go on out and tell them they can do their tests.”

He slept better that night than he had since they had brought him here. And he had an extremely vivid dream. He had always dreamed a great deal—his wife had complained about him thrashing and muttering in his sleep—but he had never had a dream like this.

He was standing on a country road, at the precise place where the black hottop gave up to bone-white dirt. A blazing summer sun shone down. On both sides of the road there was green corn, and it stretched away endlessly. There was a sign, but it was dusty and he couldn’t read it. There was the sound of crows, harsh and far away. Closer by, someone was playing an acoustic guitar, fingerpicking it. Vic Palfrey had been a picker, and it was a fine sound.

This is where I ought to get to, Stu thought dimly. Yeah, this is the place, all right.

What was that tune? “Beautiful Zion”? “The Fields of My Father’s Home”? “Sweet Bye and Bye”? Some hymn he remembered from his childhood, something he associated with full immersion and picnic lunches. But he couldn’t remember which one.

Then the music stopped. A cloud came over the sun. He began to be afraid. He began to feel that there was something terrible, something worse than plague, fire, or earthquake. Something was in the corn and it was watching him. Something dark was in the corn.

He looked, and saw two burning red eyes far back in the shadows, far back in the corn. Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel. Him, he thought. The man with no face. Oh dear God. Oh dear God no.

Then the dream was fading and he awoke with feelings of disquiet, dislocation, and relief. He went to the bathroom and then to his window. He looked out at the moon. He went back to bed but it was an hour before he got back to sleep. All that corn, he thought sleepily. Must have been Iowa or Nebraska, maybe northern Kansas. But he had never been in any of those places in his life.

Chapter 14

It was quarter of twelve. Outside the small pillbox window, dark pressed evenly against the glass. Deitz sat alone in the office cubicle, tie pulled down, collar button undone. His feet were up on the anonymous metal desk, and he was holding a microphone. On top of the desk, the reels of an old-fashioned Wollensak tape recorder turned and turned.

“This is Colonel Deitz,” he said. “Located Atlanta facility code PB-2. This is Report 16, subject file Project Blue, subfile Princess/Prince. This report, file, and subfile are Top Secret, classification 2-2-3, eyes only. If you are not classified to receive this material, fuck off, Jack.”

He stopped and let his eyes fall closed for a moment. The tape reels ran on smoothly, undergoing all the correct electrical and magnetic changes.

“Prince gave me one helluva scare tonight,” he said at last. “I won’t go into it; it’ll be in Denninger’s report. That guy will be more than willing to quote chapter and verse. Plus, of course, a transcription of my conversation with Prince will be on the telecommunications disc which also contains the transcription of this tape, which is being made at 2345 hours. I was almost pissed enough to hit him, because he scared the living Jesus out of me. I am not pissed anymore, however. The man put me into his shoes, and for just a second there I knew exactly how it feels to shake in them. He’s a fairly bright man once you get past the Gary Cooper exterior, and one independent sonofabitch. If it suits him, he’ll find all sorts of novel monkey-wrenches to throw into the gears. He has no close family in Arnette or anyplace else, so we can’t put much of a hammerlock on him. Denninger has volunteers—or says he does—who’ll be happy to go in and muscle him into a more cooperative frame of mind, and it may come to that, but if I may be pardoned another personal observation, I believe it would take more muscle than Denninger thinks. Maybe a whole lot more. For the record, I am still against it. My mother used to say you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar, and I guess I still believe it.

“Again, for the record, he still tests virus-clean. You figure it out.”

He paused again, fighting the urge to doze off. He had managed only four hours of sleep in the last seventy-two.

“Records as of twenty-two-hundred hours,” he said formally, and picked a sheaf of reports off the desk. “Henry Carmichael died while I was talking with Prince. The cop, Joseph Robert Brentwood, died half an hour ago. This won’t be in Dr. D’s report, but he was all but shitting green apples over that one. Brentwood showed a sudden positive response to the vaccine type… uh…” He shuffled papers. “Here it is. 63-A-3. See subfile, if you like. Brentwood’s fever broke, the characteristic swellings in the glands of the neck went down, he reported hunger, and ate a poached egg and a slice of unbuttered toast. Spoke rationally, wanted to know where he was, and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-do. Then, around twenty-hundred hours, the fever came back with a bang. Delirious. He broke the restraints on his bed and went reeling around the room, yelling, coughing, blowing snot, the whole bit. Then he fell over and died. Kaboom. The opinion of the team is that the vaccine killed him. It made him better for a while, but he was getting sick again even before it killed him. So, it’s back to the old drawing boards.”

He paused.

“I saved the worst for last. We can declassify Princess back to plain old Eva Hodges, female, age four, Caucasian. Her coach-and-four turned back into a pumpkin and a bunch of mice late this afternoon. To look at her, you’d think she was perfectly normal, not even a sniffle. She’s down-hearted, of course; she misses her mom. Other than that, she appears perfectly normal. She’s got it, though. Her post-lunch BP first showed a drop, then a rise, which is the only halfway decent diagnostic tool Denninger’s got so far. Before supper Denninger showed me her sputum slides—as an incentive to diet, sputum slides are really primo, believe me—and they’re lousy with those wagon-wheel germs he says aren’t really germs at all, but incubators. I can’t understand how he can know where this thing is and what it looks like and still not be able to stop it. He gives me a lot of jargon, but I don’t think he understands it, either.”

Deitz lit a cigarette.

“So where are we tonight? We’ve got a disease that’s got several well-defined stages… but some people may skip a stage. Some people may backtrack a stage. Some people may do both. Some people stay in one stage for a relatively long time and others zoom through all four as if they were on a rocket-sled. One of our two ‘clean’ subjects is no longer clean. The other is a thirty-year-old redneck who seems to be as healthy as I am. Denninger has done about thirty million tests on him and has succeeded in isolating only four abnormalities: Redman appears to have a great many moles on his body. He has a slight hypertensive condition, too slight to medicate right now. He develops a mild tic under his left eye when he’s under stress. And Denninger says he dreams a great deal more than average—almost all night, every night. They got that from the standard EEG series they ran before he went on strike. And that’s it. I can’t make anything out of it, neither can Dr. Denninger, and neither can the people who check Dr. Demento’s Work.

“This scares me, Starkey. It scares me because nobody but a very smart doctor with all the facts is going to be able to diagnose anything but a common cold in the people who are out there carrying this. Christ, nobody goes to the doctor anymore unless they’ve got pneumonia or a suspicious lump on the tit or a bad case of the dancing hives. Too hard to get one to look at you. So they’re going to stay home, drink fluids and get plenty of bedrest, and then they’re going to die. Before they do, they’re going to infect everyone who comes into the same room with them. All of us are still expecting the Prince—I think I used his real name here someplace, but at this juncture I don’t really give a fuck—to come down with it tonight or tomorrow or the day after, at the latest. And so far, no one who’s come down with it has gotten better. Those sonsofbitches out in California did this job a little too well for my taste.

“Deitz, Atlanta PB facility 2, this report ends.”

He turned off the recorder and stared at it for a long time. Then he lit another cigarette.

Chapter 15

It was two minutes to midnight.

Patty Greer, the nurse who had been trying to take Stu’s blood pressure when he went on strike was leafing through the current issue of McCall’s at the nurses’ station and waiting to go in and check Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Hapscomb. Hap would still be awake watching Johnny Carson and would be no problem. He liked to josh her about how hard it would be to pinch her bottom through her white all-over suit. Mr. Hapscomb was scared, but he was being cooperative, not like that dreadful Stuart Redman, who only looked at you and wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Mr. Hapscomb was what Patty Greer thought of as a “good sport.” As far as she was concerned, all patients could be divided into two categories: “good sports” and “old poops.” Patty, who had broken a leg roller skating when she was seven and had never spent a day in bed since, had very little patience with the “old poops.” You were either really sick and being a “good sport” or you were a hypochondriac “old poop” making trouble for a poor working girl.

Mr. Sullivan would be asleep, and he would wake up ugly. It wasn’t her fault that she had to wake him up, and she would think Mr. Sullivan would understand that. He should just be grateful that he was getting the best care the government could provide, and all free at that. And she would just tell him so if he started being an “old poop” again tonight.

The clock touched midnight; time to get going.

She left the nurses’ station and walked down the hallway toward the white room where she would first be sprayed and then helped into her suit. Halfway there, her nose began to tickle. She got her hankie out of her pocket and sneezed lightly three times. She replaced the handkerchief.

Intent on dealing with cranky Mr. Sullivan, she attached no significance to her sneezes. It was probably a touch of hay fever. The directive in the nurses’ station which said in big red letters, REPORT ANY COLD SYMPTOMS NO MATTER HOW MINOR TO YOUR SUPERVISOR AT ONCE , never even crossed her mind. They were worried that whatever those poor people from Texas had might spread outside the sealed rooms, but she also knew it was impossible for even a tiny virus to get inside the self-contained environment of the white-suits. Nevertheless, on her way down to the white room she infected an orderly, a doctor who was just getting ready to leave, and another nurse on her way to do her midnight rounds.

A new day had begun.

Chapter 16

A day later, on June 23, a big white Connie was roaring north on US 180, in another part of the country. It was doing somewhere between ninety and one hundred, its Corinthian white paint job glittering in the sun, the chrome winking. The opera windows in the rear also gave back the sun, heliographing it viciously.

The trail that Connie had left behind itself since Poke and Lloyd killed its owner and stole it somewhere just south of Hachita was wandering and pretty much senseless. Up 81 to US 80, the turnpike, until Poke and Lloyd began to feel nervous. They had killed six people in the last six days, including the owner of the Continental, his wife, and his smarmy daughter. But it was not the six murders that made them feel antsy about being on the interstate. It was the dope and the guns. Five grams of hash, a little tin snuffbox filled with God knew how much coke, and sixteen pounds of marijuana. Also two .38s, three .45s, a .357 Mag that Poke called his Pokerizer, six shotguns—two of them sawed-off pumps—and a Schmeisser submachine gun. Murder was a trifle beyond their intellectual reach, but they both understood the trouble they were going to be in if the Arizona State Police picked them up in a stolen car full of blow and shootin irons. On top of everything else, they were interstate fugitives. Had been ever since they crossed the Nevada border.

Interstate fugitives. Lloyd Henreid liked the sound of that. Gangbusters. Take that, you dirty rat. Have a lead sandwich, ya lousy copper.

So they had turned north at Deming, now on 180; had gone through Hurley and Bayard and the slightly larger town of Silver City, where Lloyd had bought a bag of burgers and eight milkshakes (why in the name of Christ had he bought eight of the motherfuckers? they would soon be pissing chocolate), grinning at the waitress in an empty yet hilarious way that made her nervous for hours afterward. I believe that man would just as soon killed me as looked at me, she told her boss that afternoon.

Past Silver City and roaring through Cliff, the road now bending west again, just the direction they didn’t want to go. Through Buckhorn and then they were back in the country God forgot, two-lane blacktop running through sagebrush and sand, buttes and mesas in the background, all that same old same old made you want to just rare back and puke at it.

“We’re gettin low on gas,” Poke said.

“Wouldn’t be if you didn’t drive so fuckin fast,” Lloyd said. He took a sip of his third milkshake, gagged on it, powered down the window, and threw out all the leftover crap, including the three milkshakes neither of them had touched.

“Whoop! Whoop!” Poke cried. He began to goose the gas pedal. The Connie lurched forward, dropped back, lurched forward.

“Ride em cowboy!” Lloyd yelled.

“Whoop! Whoop!”

“You want to smoke?”

“Smoke em if you got em,” Poke said. “Whoop! Whoop!”

There was a large green Hefty bag on the floor between Lloyd’s feet. It held the sixteen pounds of marijuana. He reached in, got a handful, and began to roll a bomber joint.

“Whoop! Whoop!” The Connie cruised back and forth over the white line.

“Cut the shit!” Lloyd shouted. “I’m spillin it everywhere!”

“Plenty more where that came from… whoop!”

“Come on, we gotta deal this stuff, man. We gotta deal this stuff or we’re gonna get caught and wind up in somebody’s trunk.”

“Okay, sport.” Poke began to drive smoothly again, but his expression was sulky. “It was your idea, your fuckin idea.”

“You thought it was a good idea.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know we’d end up drivin all over fuckin Arizona. How we ever gonna get to New York this way?”

“We’re throwin off pursuit, man,” Lloyd said. In his mind he saw police garage doors opening and thousands of 1940s radio cars issuing forth into the night. Spotlights crawling over brick walls. Come on out, Canarsie, we know you’re in there.

“Good fuckin luck,” Poke said, still sulking. “We’re doin a helluva job. You know what we got, besides that dope and the guns? We got sixteen bucks and three hundred fuckin credit cards we don’t dare use. What the fuck, we don’t even have enough cash to fill this hog’s gas tank.”

“God will provide,” Lloyd said, and spit-sealed the bomber. He lit it with the Connie’s dashboard lighter. “Happy fuckin days.”

“And if you want to sell it, what are we doing smokin it?” Poke went on, not much mollified by the thought of God providing.

“So we sell a few short ounces. Come on, Poke. Have a smoke.”

This never failed to break Poke up. He brayed laughter and took the joint. Between them, standing on its wire stock, was the Schmeisser, fully loaded. The Connie blazed on up the road, its gas gauge standing at an eighth.

Poke and Lloyd had met a year before in the Brownsville Minimum Security Station, a Nevada work farm. Brownsville was ninety acres of irrigated farmland and a prison compound of Quonset huts about sixty miles north of Tonopah and eighty northeast of Gabbs. It was a mean place to do short time. Although Brownsville Station was supposed to be a farm, nothing much grew there. Carrots and lettuce got one taste of that blaring sun, chuckled weakly, and died. Legumes—and weeds would grow, and the state legislature was fanatically dedicated to the idea that someday soybeans would grow. But the kindest thing that could be said about Brownsville’s ostensible purpose was that the desert was taking a Christless long time to bloom. The warden (who preferred to be called “the boss”) prided himself on being a hardass, and he hired only men he considered to be fellow hardasses. And, as he was fond of telling the new fish, Brownsville was mostly minimum security because when it came to escape, it was like the song said: noplace to run to, baby, noplace to hide. Some gave it a shot anyway, but most were brought back in two or three days, sunburned, glareblind, and eager to sell the boss their shriveled raisin souls for a drink of water. Some of them cackled madly, and one young man who was out for three days claimed he saw a large castle some miles south of Gabbs, a castle with a moat. The moat, he said, was guarded by trolls riding big black horses. Some months later when a Colorado revival preacher did a show at Brownsville, this same young man got Jesus in a big way.

Andrew “Poke” Freeman, in for simple assault, was released in April 1989. He had occupied a bed next to Lloyd Henreid, and had told him that if Lloyd was interested in a big score, he knew about something interesting in Vegas. Lloyd was willing.

Lloyd was released on June 1. His crime, committed in Reno, had been attempted rape. The lady was a showgirl on her way home, and she had shot a load of teargas into Lloyd’s eyes. He felt lucky to get only two to four, plus time served, plus time off for good behavior. At Brownsville it was just too fuckin hot to misbehave.

He caught a bus to Las Vegas, and Poke met him at the terminal: This is the deal, Poke told him. He knew this guy, “one-time business associate” might describe him best, and this guy was known in certain circles as Gorgeous George. He did some piecework for a group of people with mostly Italian and Sicilian names. George was strictly part-time help. What he did mostly for these Sicilian-type people was to take things and bring things. Sometimes he took things from Vegas to L.A.; sometimes he brought other things from L.A. to Vegas. Small-time dope mostly, freebies for big-time customers. Sometimes guns. The guns were always a bring, never a take. As Poke understood it (and Poke’s understanding never got much beyond what the movie people call “soft focus”), these Sicilian-type people sometimes sold iron to independent thieves. Well, Poke said, Gorgeous George was willing to tell them the time and place when a fairly good haul of these items would be in the offing. George was asking twenty-five percent of what they realized. Poke and Lloyd would crash in on George, tie him and gag him, take the stuff, and maybe give him a couple of biffs and baffs for good measure. It had to look good, George had cautioned, because these Sicilian-type people were no one to fool around with.

“Well,” Lloyd said, “it sounds good.”

The next day Poke and Lloyd went to see Gorgeous George, a mild-mannered six-footer with a small head which sat incongruously above his roofbeam shoulders on a neck which did not seem to exist. He had a full head of waved blond hair, which made him look a bit like the famed wrestler.

Lloyd had had second thoughts about the deal, but Poke had changed his mind again. Poke was good at that. George told them to come around to his house the following Friday evening around six. “Wear masks, for God’s sake,” he said. “And you bloody my nose and black my eye, too. Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this.”

The big night came. Poke and Lloyd took a bus to the corner of George’s street and put on ski-masks at the foot of his walk. The door was locked, but as George had promised, not too tightly locked. There was a rumpus room downstairs, and there was George, standing in front of a Hefty bag full of pot. The Ping-Pong table was loaded down with guns. George was scared.

“Jesus, oh Jesus, I wish I’d never gotten into this,” he kept saying as Lloyd tied his feet with clothesrope and Poke bound his hands with Scotch brand filament tape.

Then Lloyd biffed George in the nose, bloodying it, and Poke baffed him in the eye, blacking it as per request.

“Jeez!” George cried. “Did you have to do it so hard?”

“You were the one wanted to make sure it looked good,” Lloyd pointed out. Poke plastered a piece of adhesive tape across George’s mouth. The two of them had begun to gather up the swag.

“You know something, old buddy?” Poke said, pausing.

“Nope,” Lloyd said, giggling nervously. “Not a thing.”

“I wonder if ole George there can keep a secret.”

For Lloyd, this was a brand-new consideration. He stared thoughtfully at Gorgeous George for a long hard minute. George’s eyes bugged back at him in sudden terror.

Then Lloyd said, “Sure. It’s his ass too.” But he sounded as uneasy as he felt. When certain seeds are planted, they nearly always grow.

Poke smiled. “Oh, he could just say, ‘Hey guys. I met this old friend and his buddy. We shot the shit for a while, had a few beers, and what do you think, the sonsofbitches came over to the house and took me off. Sure hope you catch em. Lemme tell you what they look like.’”

George was shaking his head wildly, his eyes capital Os of terror.

The guns were by then in a heavy canvas laundry sack they had found in the downstairs bathroom. Now Lloyd hefted the bag nervously and said, “Well, what do you think we ought to do?”

“I think we ought to pokerize him, ole buddy,” Poke said regretfully. “Only thing we can do.”

Lloyd said, “That seems awful hard, after he put us onto this.”

“Hard old world, buddy.”

“Yeah,” Lloyd sighed, and they walked over to George.

“Mph,” George said, shaking his head wildly. “Mmmmmnh! Mmmmph! ”

“I know,” Poke soothed him. “Bitch, ain’t it? I’m sorry, George, no shit. It ain’t a bit personal. Want you to ‘member that. Catch on his head, Lloyd.”

That was easier said than done. Gorgeous George was whipping his head wildly from side to side. He was sitting in the corner of his rumpus room and the walls were cinderblock and he kept rapping his head against them. Didn’t even seem to feel it.

“Catch him,” Poke said serenely, and ripped another piece of tape from the roll.

Lloyd at last got him by the hair and managed to hold him still long enough for Poke to slap the second strip of adhesive neatly across George’s nose, thereby sealing all of his tubes. George went purely crazy. He rolled out of the corner, bellywhopped, and then lay there, humping the floor and making muffled sounds which Lloyd supposed were supposed to be screams. Poor old fellow. It went on for almost five minutes before George was completely still. He bucked and scrabbled and thumped. His face got as red as the side of old Dad’s barn. The last thing he did was to lift both legs eight or ten inches straight up off the floor and bring them down with a crash. It reminded Lloyd of something he had seen in a Bugs Bunny cartoon or something, and he chuckled a little, feeling a bit cheered up. Up until then it had been sort of gruesome to see.

Poke squatted beside George and felt for his pulse.

“Well?” Lloyd said.

“Nothin tickin but his watch, ole buddy,” Poke said. “Speakin of which…” He lifted George’s meaty arm and looked at his wrist. “Naw, just a Timex. I was thinkin it might be a Casio, somethin like that.” He let George’s arm drop.

George’s car keys were in his front pants pocket. And in an upstairs cupboard they found a Skippy peanut butter jar half filled with dimes, and they took those, too. There was twenty dollars and sixty cents in dimes.

George’s car was a wheezy old Mustang with a four on the floor and lousy shocks and tires that were as bald as Telly Savalas. They left Vegas on US 93 and went southeast into Arizona. By noon of the next day, day before yesterday, they had skirted Phoenix on the back roads. Yesterday around nine they had stopped at a dusty old general store two miles beyond Sheldon on Arizona Highway 75. They knocked over the store and pokerized the proprietor, an elderly gentleman with mail-order false teeth. They got sixty-three dollars and the old dudemar’s pickup truck.

The pickup truck had blown two tires this morning. Two tires at the same time, and neither of them could find any tacks or nails on the road at all, although they spent nearly half an hour looking, swapping a bomber joint back and forth as they did so. Poke finally said it must have been a coincidence. Lloyd said he had heard of stranger things, by God. Then along came the white Connie, like an answer to their prayers. They had crossed the state line from Arizona into New Mexico earlier on, although neither of them knew it, and so they had become meat for the FBI.

The Connie’s driver had pulled over, leaned out, and said: “Need any help?”

“Sure do,” Poke had said, and pokerized the guy right on the spot. Got him dead-bang between the eyes with the .357 Mag. Poor sucker probably never even knew what had hit him.

“Why don’t you turn here?” Lloyd said, pointing to the junction coming up. He was pleasantly stoned.

“Sure could,” Poke said cheerfully. He let the Connie’s speed drop from eighty to sixty. Drifted it to the left, right wheels barely leaving the ground, and then a new piece of road was unrolling in front of them. Route 78, due west. And so, not knowing they had ever left it or that they were now the perpetrators of what the newspapers were calling a TRI-STATE KILL-SPREE, they reentered Arizona.

About an hour later a sign came up on their right: BURRACK 6.

“Burlap?” Lloyd said foggily.

“Burrack,” Poke said, and began twisting the Connie’s wheel so that the car made big graceful loops back and forth across the road. “Whoop! Whoop!”

“You want to stop there? I’m hungry, man.”

“You’re always hungry.”

“Fuck you. When I get stoned, I get the munchies.”

“You can munch my nine-inch hogleg, how’s that? Whoop! Whoop!”

“Seriously, Poke. Let’s stop.”

“Okay. Got to get some cash, too. We’ve thrown off enough fuckin pursuit for a while. We got to get some money and shag ass north. This desert shit makes no sense to me.”

“Okay,” Lloyd said. He didn’t know if it was the dope working on him or what, but all of a sudden he felt paranoid as hell, even worse than when they had been on the turnpike. Poke was right. Stop outside this Burrack and pull a score like they had outside of Sheldon. Get some money and some gas station maps, ditch this fuckin Connie for something that would blend into the scenery, then head north and east by the secondary roads. Get the fuck out of Arizona.

“I’ll tell you the truth, man,” Poke said. “All of a sudden I feel as nervous as a longtail cat in a room fulla rockin chairs.”

“I know what you mean, jellybean,” Lloyd said gravely, and then it hit them both funny and they broke up.

Burrack was a wide place in the road. They shot through it and on the other side was a combination café, store, and gas station. There was an old Ford wagon and a dust-streaked Olds with a horse trailer behind it in the dirt parking lot. The horse stared out at them as Poke wheeled the Connie in.

“This looks like just the ticket,” Lloyd said.

Poke agreed. He reached into the back for the .357 and checked the loads. “You ready?”

“I guess so,” Lloyd said, and took hold of the Schmeisser.

They walked across the baked parking lot. The police had known who they were for four days now; they had left their fingerprints all over Gorgeous George’s house, and in the store where the old man with the mail-order dentures had been pokerized. The old man’s pickup had been found within fifty feet of the bodies of the three people who belonged with the Continental, and it seemed reasonable to assume that the men who had killed Gorgeous George and the store owner had also killed these three. If they had been listening to the Connie’s radio instead of the tape-player, they would have known that Arizona and New Mexico police were coordinating the largest manhunt in forty years, all for a couple of small-time grifters who could not quite comprehend what they might have done to start such a fuss.

The gas was self-service; the clerk had to turn on the pump. So they went up the steps and inside. Three aisles of canned goods went up the room toward the counter. At the counter a man in cowboy clothes was paying for a pack of smokes and half a dozen Slim Jims. Halfway down the middle aisle a tired-looking woman with coarse black hair was trying to decide between two brands of spaghetti sauce. The place smelled of stale licorice and sun and tobacco and age. The proprietor was a freckled man in a gray shirt. He was wearing a company cap that said SHELL in red letters against a white field. He looked up as the screen door slapped shut and his eyes widened.

Lloyd put the wire stock of the Schmeisser against his shoulder and fired a burst at the ceiling. The two hanging lightbulbs shattered like bombs. The man in the cowboy clothes began to turn around.

“Just hold still and nobody’ll get hurt!” Lloyd shouted, and Poke immediately made him a liar by blowing a hole through the woman looking at the sauces. She flew out of her shoes.

“Holy gee, Poke!” Lloyd hollered. “You didn’t have to—”

“Pokerized her, ole buddy!” Poke yelled. “She’ll never watch Jerry Falwell again! Whoop! Whoop!”

The man in the cowboy clothes kept turning. He was holding his smokes in his left hand. The harsh light falling through the show window and the screen door pricked out bright stars on the dark lenses of his sunglasses. There was a .45 revolver tucked into his belt, and now he plucked it out unhurriedly as Lloyd and Poke were staring at the dead woman. He aimed, fired, and the left side of Poke’s face suddenly disappeared in a spray of blood and tissue and teeth.

“Shot! ” Poke screamed, dropping the .357 and flailing backward. His flailing hands raked potato chips and taco chips and Cheez Doodles onto the splintery wooden floor. “Shot me, Lloyd! Look out! Shot me! Shot me! ” He hit the screen door and it slammed open and Poke sat down hard on the porch outside, pulling one of the aged door hinges loose.

Lloyd, stunned, fired more in reflex than in self-defense. The Schmeisser’s roar filled the room. Cans flew. Bottles crashed, spilling catsup, pickles, olives. The glass front of the Pepsi cooler jingled inward. Bottles of Dr. Pepper and Jolt and Orange Crush exploded like clay pigeons. Foam ran everywhere. The man in the cowboy clothes, cool, calm, and collected, fired his piece again. Lloyd felt rather than heard the bullet as it droned by nearly close enough to part hair. He raked the Schmeisser across the room, from left to right.

The man in the SHELL cap dropped behind the counter with such suddenness that an observer might have thought a trapdoor had been sprung on him. A gumball machine disintegrated. Red, blue, and green chews rolled everywhere. The glass bottles on the counter exploded. One of them had contained pickled eggs; another, pickled pigs’ feet. Immediately the room was filled with the sharp odor of vinegar.

The Schmeisser put three bullet holes in the cowboy’s khaki shirt and most of his innards exited from the back to splatter all over Spuds MacKenzie. The cowboy went down, still clutching his .45 in one hand and his deck of Luckies in the other.

Lloyd, bullshit with fear, continued to fire. The machine pistol was growing hot in his hands. A box filled with returnable soda bottles tinkled and fell over. A calendar girl wearing hotpants took a bullet hole in one magical peach-colored thigh. A rack of paperbacks with no covers crashed over. Then the Schmeisser was empty, and the new silence was deafening. The smell of gunpowder was heavy and rank.

“Holy gee,” Lloyd said. He looked cautiously at the cowboy. It didn’t look like the cowboy was going to be a problem in either the near or distant future.

“Shot me! ” Poke brayed, and staggered back inside. He clawed the screen door out of his way with such force that the other hinge popped and the door slapped onto the porch. “Shot me, Lloyd, look out! ”

“I got him, Poke,” Lloyd soothed, but Poke seemed not to hear. He was a mess. His right eye blazed like a baleful sapphire. The left was gone. His left cheek had been vaporized; you could watch his jaw work on that side as he talked. Most of his teeth were gone over there, too. His shirt was soaked with blood. When you got right down to it, Poke was sort of a mess.

“Stupid fuck blew me up! ” Poke screamed. He bent over and got the .357 Mag. “I’ll teach you to shoot me, you dumb fuck.”

He advanced on the cowboy, a rural Dr. Sardonicus. He put one foot on the cowboy’s butt like a hunter posing for a picture with the bear which would soon be decorating the wall of his den, and prepared to empty the .357 into his head. Lloyd stood watching, gape-mouthed, the smoking machine pistol dangling from one hand, still trying to figure out how all of this had happened.

At that moment the man in the SHELL cap popped back up from behind the counter like Jack from his box, his face screwed up in an expression of desperate intent, a double-barreled shotgun clutched in both hands.

“Huh?” Poke said, and looked up just in time to get both barrels. He went down, his face a worse mess than ever and not caring a bit.

Lloyd decided it was time to leave. Fuck the money. There was money everywhere. The time to throw off a little more pursuit had clearly come. He wheeled and exited the store in large shambling strides, his boots barely touching the boards.

He was halfway down the steps when an Arizona State Police cruiser wheeled into the yard. A trooper got out on the passenger side and pulled his pistol. “Hold it right there! What’s going on in there?”

“Three people dead!” Lloyd cried. “Hell of a mess! Guy that did it went out the back! I’m gettin the fuck out!”

He ran to the Connie, had actually slipped behind the wheel, and was just remembering that the keys were in Poke’s pocket when the trooper yelled: “Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!”

Lloyd halted. After examining the radical surgery on Poke’s face, it didn’t take a long time to decide he’d just as soon pass.

“Holy gee,” he said miserably as a second trooper laid a big horse pistol upside his head. The first one cuffed him.

“In the back of the cruiser, Sunny Jim.”

The man in the SHELL cap had come out onto the porch, still clutching his shotgun. “He shot Bill Markson!” he yelled in a high, queer voice. “T’other one shot Missus Storm! Hell of a note! I shot t’other one! He’s deader’n a shitbug! Like to shoot this one too, iff’n you boys’ll stand away!”

“Calm down, Pop,” one of the troopers said. “Fun’s over.”

“I’ll shoot him where he stands!” the old guy yelled. “I’ll lay him low!” Then he leaned forward like an English butler making a bow and threw up on his shoes.

“You boys get me away from that guy, would you?” Lloyd said. “I believe he’s crazy.”

“You got this comin outta the store, Sunny Jim,” the trooper who had thrown down on him in the first place said. The barrel of his pistol looped up and up, catching the sun, and then it crashed down on Lloyd Henreid’s head and he never woke up until that evening in the Apache County Jail’s infirmary.

Chapter 17

Starkey was standing in front of monitor 2, keeping a close eye on Tech 2nd Class Frank D. Bruce. When we last saw Bruce, he was facedown in a bowl of Chunky Sirloin Soup. No change except for the positive ID. Situation normal, all fucked up.

Thoughtfully, hands locked behind his back like a general reviewing troops, like General Black Jack Pershing, his boyhood idol, Starkey moved down to monitor 4, where the situation had changed for the better. Dr. Emmanual Ezwick still lay dead on the floor, but the centrifuge had stopped. At 1940 hours last night, the centrifuge had begun to emit fine tendrils of smoke. At 1995 hours the sound pickups in Ezwick’s lab had transmitted a whunga-whunga-whunga sort of sound that deepened into a fuller, richer, and more satisfying ronk! ronk! ronk! At 2107 hours the centrifuge had ronked its last ronk and had slowly come to rest. Was it Newton who had said that somewhere, beyond the farthest star, there may be a body perfectly at rest? Newton had been right about everything but the distance, Starkey thought. You didn’t have to go far at all. Project Blue was perfectly at rest. Starkey was very glad. The centrifuge had been the last illusion of life, and the problem he’d had Steffens run through the main computer bank (Steffens had looked at him as though he were crazy, and yes, Starkey thought he might be) was: How long could that centrifuge be expected to run? The answer, which had come back in 6.6 seconds, was: ± 3 YEARS PROBABLE MALFUNCTION NEXT TWO WEEKS .009% AREAS OF PROBABLE MALFUNCTION BEARINGS 38% MAIN MOTOR 16% ALL OTHER 54%. That was a smart computer. Starkey had gotten Steffens to query it again after the actual burnout of Ezwick’s centrifuge. The computer communed with the Engineering Systems data bank and confirmed that the centrifuge had indeed burned out its bearings.

Remember that, Starkey thought as his caller began to beep urgently behind him. The sound of burning bearings in the final stages of collapse is ronk-ronk-ronk.

He went to the caller and pushed the button that snapped off the beeper. “Yes, Len.”

“Billy, I’ve got an urgent from one of our teams in a town called Sipe Springs, Texas. Almost four hundred miles from Arnette. They say they have to talk to you; it’s a command decision.”

“What is it, Len?” he asked calmly. He had taken over sixteen “downers” in the last ten hours, and was, generally speaking, feeling fine. Not a sign of a ronk.

“Press.”

“Oh Jesus,” Starkey said mildly. “Patch them through.”

There was a muffled roar of static with a voice talking unintelligibly behind it.

“Wait a minute,” Len said.

The static slowly cleared.

“—Lion, Team Lion, do you read, Blue Base? Can you read? One… two… three… four… this is Team Lion—”

“I’ve got you, Team Lion,” Starkey said. “This is Blue Base One.”

“Problem is coded Flowerpot in the Contingency Book,” the tinny voice said. “Repeat, Flowerpot.”

“I know what the fuck Flowerpot is,” Starkey said. “What’s the situation?”

The tinny voice coming from Sipe Springs talked uninterrupted for almost five minutes. The situation itself was unimportant, Starkey thought, because the computer had informed him two days ago that just this sort of situation (in some shape or form) was apt to occur before the end of June. 88% probability. The specifics didn’t matter. If it had two legs and belt-loops, it was a pair of pants. Never mind the color.

A doctor in Sipe Springs had made some good guesses, and a pair of reporters for a Houston daily had linked what was happening in Sipe Springs with what had already happened in Arnette, Verona, Commerce City, and a town called Polliston, Kansas. Those were the towns where the problem had gotten so bad so fast that the army had been sent in to quarantine. The computer had a list of twenty-five other towns in ten states where traces of Blue were beginning to show up.

The Sipe Springs situation wasn’t important because it wasn’t unique. They’d had their chance at unique in Arnette—well, maybe—and flubbed it. What was important was that the “situation” was finally going to see print on something besides yellow military flimsy; was, anyway, unless Starkey took steps. He hadn’t decided whether to do that or not. But when the tinny voice stopped talking, Starkey realized that he had made the decision after all. He had perhaps made it as long as twenty years ago.

It came down to what was important. And what was important wasn’t the fact of the disease; it wasn’t the fact that Atlanta’s integrity had somehow been breached and they were going to have to switch the whole preventative operation to much less satisfactory facilities in Stovington, Vermont; it wasn’t the fact that Blue spread in such sneaky common-cold disguise.

“What is important—”

“Say again, Blue Base One,” the voice said anxiously. “We did not copy.”

What was important was that a regrettable incident had occurred. Starkey flashed back in time twenty-two years to 1968. He had been in the officers’ club in San Diego when the news came about Calley and what had happened at Mei Lai Four. Starkey had been playing poker with four other men, two of whom now sat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The poker game had been forgotten, utterly forgotten, in a discussion of exactly what this was going to do to the military—not any one branch but the entire military—in the witch-hunt atmosphere of Washington’s fourth estate. And one of their number, a man who could now dial directly to the miserable worm who had been masquerading as a Chief Executive since January 20, 1959, had laid his cards carefully down on the green felt table and he had said: Gentlemen, a regrettable incident has occurred. And when a regrettable incident occurs which involves any branch of the United States Military, we don’t question the roots of that incident but rather how the branches may best be pruned. The service is mother and father to us. And if you find your mother raped or your father beaten and robbed, before you call the police or begin an investigation, you cover their nakedness. Because you love them.

Starkey had never heard anyone talk so well before or since.

Now he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and fumbled out a thin blue folder bound with red tape. The legend written on the cover read: IF TAPE IS BROKEN NOTIFY ALL SECURITY DIVISIONS AT ONCE. Starkey broke the tape.

“Are you there, Blue Base One?” the voice was asking. “We do not copy you. Repeat, do not copy.”

“I’m here, Lion,” Starkey said. He had flipped to the last page of the book and now ran his finger down a column labeled EXTREME COVERT COUNTERMEASURES.

“Lion, do you read?”

“We read five-by, Blue Base One.”

“Troy,” Starkey said deliberately. “I repeat, Lion: Troy. Repeat back, please. Over to you.”

Silence. A faraway mumble of static. Starkey was fleetingly reminded of the walkie-talkies they made as kids, two tin Del Monte cans and twenty yards of waxed string.

“I say again—”

“Oh Jesus!” a very young voice in Sipe Springs gulped.

“Repeat back, son,” Starkey said.

“T-Troy,” the voice said. Then, more strongly: “Troy.”

“Very good,” Starkey said calmly. “God bless you, son. Over and out.”

“And you, sir. Over and out.”

A click, followed by heavy static, followed by another click, silence, and Len Creighton’s voice. “Billy?”

“Yes, Len.”

“I copied the whole thing.”

“That’s fine, Len,” Starkey said tiredly. “You make your report as you see fit. Of course.”

“You don’t understand, Billy,” Len said. “You did the right thing. Don’t you think I know that?”

Starkey let his eyes slip closed. For a moment all the sweet downers deserted him. “God bless you, too, Len,” he said, and his voice was close to breaking. He switched off and went back to stand in front of monitor 2. He put his hands behind his back like a Black Jack Pershing reviewing troops. He regarded Frank D. Bruce and his final resting place. In a little while he felt calm again.

Going southeast out of Sipe Springs, if you get on US 36, you are headed in the general direction of Houston, a day’s drive away. The car burning up the road was a three-year-old Pontiac Bonneville, doing eighty, and when it came over the rise and saw the nondescript Ford blocking the road, there was nearly an accident.

The driver, a thirty-six-year-old stringer for a large Houston daily, tromped on the power brake and the tires began to screech, the Pontiac’s nose first dipping down toward the road and then beginning to break to the left.

“Holy Gawd!” the photographer in the shotgun seat cried. He dropped his camera to the floor and began to scramble his seat belt across his middle.

The driver let up on the brake, skirted the Ford on the shoulder, and then felt his left wheels start to drag in the soft dirt. He matted the gas pedal and the Bonneville responded with more traction, dragging back onto the blacktop. Blue smoke squirted from beneath the tires. The radio blared on and on:

Baby, can you dig your man,

He’s a righteous man,

Baby, can you dig your man?

He tromped the brake again, and the Bonneville slued to a stop in the middle of the hot and deserted afternoon. He drew in a ragged, terrified breath and then coughed it out in a series of bursts. He began to be angry. He threw the Pontiac into reverse and backed toward the Ford and the two men standing behind it.

“Listen,” the photographer said nervously. He was fat and hadn’t been in a fight since the ninth grade. “Listen, maybe we just better—”

He was thrown forward with a grunt as the stringer brought the Pontiac to another screeching halt, threw the transmission lever into park with one hard thrust of his hand, and got out.

He began to walk toward the two young men behind the Ford, his hands doubled into fists.

“All right, motherfuckers!” he shouted. “You almost got us fucking killed and I want—”

He had been in the service, four years in the army. Volunteer. He had just time to identify the rifles as the new M-3A’s when they brought them up from below the rear deck of the Ford. He stood shocked in the hot Texas sunshine and made water in his pants.

He began to scream and in his mind he was turning to run back to the Bonneville but his feet never moved. They opened up on him, and slugs blew out his chest and groin. As he dropped to his knees, holding both hands out mutely for mercy, a slug struck him an inch over his left eye and tore off the top of his head.

The photographer, who had been twisted over the back seat, found it impossible to comprehend exactly what had happened until the two young men stepped over the stringer’s body and began to walk toward him, rifles raised.

He slid across the Pontiac’s seat, warm bubbles of saliva collecting at the corners of his mouth. The keys were still in the ignition. He turned the car on and screamed out just as they began shooting. He felt the car lurch to the right as if a giant had kicked the left rear, and the wheel began to shimmy wildly in his hands. The photographer bounced up and down as the Bonneville pogoed up the road on the flat tire. A second later the giant kicked the other side of the car. The shimmy got worse. Sparks flew off the blacktop. The photographer was whining. The Pontiac’s rear tires shimmied and flapped like black rags. The two young men ran back to their Ford, whose serial number was listed among the multitude in the Army Vehicles division at the Pentagon, and one of them drove it around in a tight, swaying circle. The nose bounced wildly as it came off the shoulder and drove over the body of the stringer. The sergeant in the passenger seat sprayed a startled sneeze onto the windshield.

Ahead of them, the Pontiac washing-machined along on its two flat rear tires, the nose bouncing up and down. Behind the wheel the fat photographer had begun to weep at the sight of the dark Ford growing in the rearview mirror. He had the accelerator pressed to the floor but the Pontiac would do no more than forty and it was all over the road. On the radio Larry Underwood had been replaced by Madonna. Madonna was asserting that she was a material girl.

The Ford swung around the Bonneville and for one second of crystal hope the photographer thought it was going to keep right on going, to just disappear over the desolate horizon and let him alone.

Then it pulled back in, and the Pontiac’s wildly jittering nose caught its mudguard. There was a scream of pulling metal. The photographer’s head flew forward into the wheel and blood sprayed from his nose.

Throwing terrified, creaky-necked glances back over his shoulder, he slid across the warm plastic seat as if it were grease and got out on the passenger’s side. He ran down the shoulder. There was a barbed wire fence and he leaped over it, sailing up and up like a blimp, and he thought: I’m going to make it, I can run forever —

He fell down on the other side with his leg caught in the barbs. Screaming at the sky, he was still trying to free his pants and dimpled white flesh when the two young men came down the shoulder with their guns in their hands.

Why, he tried to ask them, but all that came out of him was a low and helpless squawk and then his brains exited the back of his head.

There was no published report of disease or any other trouble in Sipe Springs, Texas, that day.

Chapter 18

Nick opened the door between Sheriff Baker’s office and the jail cells and they started razzing him right off. Vincent Hogan and Billy Warner were in the two Saltine-box cells on Nick’s left. Mike Childress was in one of the two on the right. The other was empty and it was empty because Ray Booth, he of the purple LSU fraternity ring, had flown the coop.

“Hey, dummy!” Childress called. “Hey, you fuckin dummy! What’s gonna happen to you when we get outta here? Huh? What the fuck’s gonna happen to you?”

“I’m personally gonna rip your balls off and stuff em down your throat until you strangle on em,” Billy Warner told him. “You understand me?”

Only Vince Hogan didn’t participate in the razzing. Mike and Billy didn’t have too much use for him on this day, June 23, when they were to be taken up to the Calhoun County seat and jugged pending trial. Sheriff Baker had leaned on Vince and Vince had spilled his yellow guts. Baker had told Nick he could get an indictment against these ole boys, but when it got to a jury trial, it was going to be Nick’s word against these three—four, if they picked up Ray Booth.

Nick had gained a healthy respect for Sheriff John Baker these last couple of days. He was a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound ex-farmer who was predictably called Big Bad John by his constituents. The respect Nick felt for him was not because Baker had given him this job swamping out the holding area to make up for his lost week’s pay, but because he had gone after the men who had beaten and robbed Nick. He had done it as if Nick were a member of one of the oldest and most respected families in town instead of just a deaf-mute drifter. There were plenty of sheriffs here in the border South, Nick knew, who would have seen him on a work farm or roadgang for six months instead.

They had driven out to the sawmill where Vince Hogan worked, taking Baker’s private car, a Power Wagon, instead of the county prowler car. There was a shotgun under the dash (“Always locked up and always loaded,” Baker said) and a bubble light Baker put on the dash when he was on police business. He put it up there when they swung into the lumberyard parking area, two days ago now. Baker had hawked, spat out the window, blew his nose, and dabbed at his red eyes with a handkerchief. His voice had acquired a nasal foghorn quality. Nick couldn’t hear it, of course, but he didn’t need to. It was clear enough that the man had a nasty cold.

“Now, when we see him, I’ll grab him by the arm,” Baker said. “I’ll ask you, ‘Is this one of em?’ You give me a big nod yes. I don’t care if it was or not. You just nod. Get it?”

Nick nodded. He got it.

Vince was working the board planer, feeding rough planks into the machine, standing in sawdust almost to the top of his workboots. He gave John Baker a nervous smile, and his eyes flicked uneasily to Nick standing beside the sheriff. Nick’s face was thin and battered and still too pale.

“Hi, Big John, what you doin out with the workin folk?”

The other men in the crew were watching all this, their eyes shifting gravely from Nick to Vince to Baker and then back the other way like men watching some complicated new version of tennis. One of them spat a stream of Honey Cut into the fresh sawdust and wiped off his chin with the heel of his hand.

Baker grabbed Vince Hogan by one flabby, sunburned arm and pulled him forward.

“Hey! What’s the idea, Big John?”

Baker turned his head so Nick could see his lips. “Is this one of em?”

Nick nodded firmly, and pointed at Vince for good measure.

“What is this?” Vince protested again. “I don’t know this dummy from Adam.”

“Then how come you know he’s a dummy? Come on, Vince, you’re going to the cooler. Toot-sweet. You can send one of these boys to get your toothbrush.”

Protesting, Vince was led to the Power Wagon and deposited inside. Protesting, he was taken back to town. Protesting, he was locked up and left to stew for a couple of hours. Baker didn’t bother with reading him his rights. “Damn fool’d just get confused,” he told Nick. When Baker went back around noon, Vince was too hungry and too scared to do any more protesting. He just spilled everything.

Mike Childress was in the jug by one o’clock, and Baker got Billy Warner at his house just as Billy was packing up his old Chrysler to go someplace—along piece from the look of all the packed liquor-store boxes and strapped-together luggage. But somebody had talked to Ray Booth, and Ray had been just smart enough to move a little quicker.

Baker took Nick home to meet his wife and have some supper. In the car Nick wrote on the memo pad: “I am sure sorry it’s her brother. How is she taking it?”

“She’s bearing up,” Baker said, both his voice and the set of his body almost formal. “I guess she’s done some crying over him, but she knew what he was. And she knows you can’t pick your relatives like you do your friends.”

Jane Baker was a small, pretty woman who had indeed been crying. Looking at her deeply socketed eyes made Nick uncomfortable. But she shook his hand warmly and said; “I’m pleased to know you, Nick. And I apologize deeply for your trouble. I feel responsible, with one of mine being a part of it and all.”

Nick shook his head and shuffled his feet awkwardly.

“I offered him a job around the place,” Baker said. “Station’s gone right to hell since Bradley moved up to Little Rock. Painting and picking up, mostly. He’s gonna have to stick around for a while anyway—for the… you know.”

“The trial, yes,” she said.

There was a moment then in which the silence was so heavy even Nick found it painful.

Then, with forced gaiety, she said, “I hope you eat redeye ham, Nick. That’s what there is, along with some corn and a big bowl of slaw. My slaw’s never been up to what his mother used to make. That’s what he says, anyway.”

Nick rubbed his stomach and smiled.

Over dessert (a strawberry shortcake—Nick, who had been on short rations during the last couple of weeks, had two helpings), Jane Baker said to her husband: “Your cold sounds worse. You’ve been taking too much on, John Baker. And you didn’t eat enough to keep a fly alive.”

Baker looked guiltily at his plate for a moment, then shrugged. “I can afford to miss a meal now and then,” he said, and palpated his double chin.

Nick, watching them, wondered how two people of such radically different size got along in bed. I guess they manage, he thought with an interior grin. They sure look comfortable enough with each other. And not that it’s any of my business anyway.

“You’re flushed, too. You carrying a fever?”

Baker shrugged. “Nope… well. Maybe a touch.”

“Well, you’re not going out again tonight. That’s final.”

“My dear, I have prisoners. If they don’t specially need to be watched, they do need to be fed and watered.”

“Nick can do it,” she said with finality. “You’re going to bed. And don’t go on about your insomnia; it won’t do you any good.”

“I cant send Nick,” he said weakly. “He’s a deaf-mute. Besides, he ain’t a deputy.”

“Well then, you just up and deputize him.”

“He ain’t a resident!”

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Jane Baker said inexorably. She stood up and began clearing the table. “Now you just go on and do it, John.”

And that was how Nick Andros went from Shoyo prisoner to Shoyo deputy in less than twenty-four hours. As he was preparing to go up to the sheriff’s office, Baker came into the downstairs hall, looking large and ghostly in a frayed bathrobe. He seemed embarrassed to be on view in such attire

“I never should have let her talk me into this,” he said. “Wouldn’t have done, either, if I didn’t feel so punk. My chest’s all clogged up and I’m as hot as a fire sale two days before Christmas. Weak, too.”

Nick nodded sympathetically.

“I’m stuck between deputies. Bradley Caide and his wife went up to Little Rock after their baby passed away. One of those crib deaths. Awful thing. I don’t blame them for going.”

Nick pointed at his own chest and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

“Sure, you’ll be okay. You just take normal care, you hear? There’s a .45 in the third drawer of my desk, but don’t you be takin it back there. Nor the keys either. Understand?”

Nick nodded.

“If you go back there, stay out of their reach. If any of em tries playin sick, don’t you fall for it. It’s the oldest dodge in the world. If one of em should get sick, Doc Soames can see them just as easy in the morning. I’ll be in then.”

Nick took his pad from his pocket and wrote: “I appreciate you trusting me. Thanks for locking them up & thanks for the job.”

Baker read this carefully. “You’re a puredee caution, boy. Where you from? How come you’re out on your own like this?”

“That’s a long story,” Nick jotted. “I’ll write some of it down for you tonight, if you want.”

“You do that,” Baker said. “I guess you know I put your name on the wire.”

Nick nodded. It was SOP. But he was clean.

“I’ll get Jane to call Ma’s Truck Stop out by the highway. Those boys’ll be hollering police brutality if they don’t get their supper.”

Nick wrote: “Have her tell whoever brings it to come right in. I can’t hear him if he knocks.”

“Okay.” Baker hesitated a moment longer. “You got your cot in the corner. It’s hard, but it’s clean. You just remember to be careful, Nick. You can’t call for help if there’s trouble.”

Nick nodded and wrote, “I can take care of myself.”

“Yeah, I believe you can. Still, I’d get someone from town if I thought any of them would—” He broke off as Jane came in.

“You still jawing this poor boy? You let him go on, now, before my stupid brother comes along and breaks them all out.”

Baker laughed sourly. “He’ll be in Tennessee by now, I guess.” He whistled out a long sigh that broke up into a series of phlegmy, booming coughs. “I b’lieve I’ll go upstairs and lie down, Janey.”

“I’ll bring you some aspirin to cut that fever,” she said.

She looked back over her shoulder at Nick as she went to the stairs with her husband. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Nick. Whatever the circumstances. You be just as careful as he says.”

Nick bowed to her, and she dropped half a curtsy in return. He thought he saw a gleam of tears in her eyes.

A pimply, curious boy in a dirty busboy’s jacket brought three dinner trays about half an hour after Nick had gotten down to the jail. Nick motioned for the busboy to put the trays on the cot, and while he did, Nick scribbled: “Is this paid for?”

The busboy read this with all the concentration of a college freshman tackling Moby Dick. “Sure,” he said. “Sheriff’s office runs a tab. Say, can’t you talk?”

Nick shook his head.

“That’s a bitch,” the busboy said, and left in a hurry, as if the condition might be catching.

Nick took the trays in one at a time and pushed each one through the slot in the bottom of the cell door with a broomhandle.

He looked up in time to catch “—chickshit bastard, ain’t he?” from Mike Childress. Smiling, Nick showed him his middle finger.

“I’ll give you the finger, you dummy,” Childress said, grinning unpleasantly. “When I get out of here I’ll—” Nick turned away, missing the rest.

Back in the office, sitting in Baker’s chair, he drew the memo pad into the center of the blotter, sat thinking for a moment, and then jotted at the top:

Life History

By Nick Andros

He stopped, smiling a little. He had been in some funny places, but never in his wildest dreams had he expected to be sitting in a sheriff’s office, deputized, in charge of three men who had beaten him up, and writing his life story. After a moment he began to write again:

I was born in Caslin, Nebraska, on November 14, 1968. My daddy was an independent farmer. He and my mom were always on the edge of getting squeezed out. They owed three different banks. My mother was six months pregnant with me and my dad was taking her to see the doctor in town when a tie rod on his truck let go and they went into the ditch. My daddy had a heart attack and died.

Anyway, three months after, my mom had me and I was born the way I am. Sure was a tough break on top of losing her husband that way.

She carried on with the farm until 1973 and then lost it to the “big operators,” as she always called them. She had no family but wrote to some friends in Big Springs, Iowa, and one of them got her a job in a bakery. We lived here until 1977 when she was killed in an accident. A motorcycle hit her while she was crossing the street on her way home from work. It wasn’t even his fault but only bad luck as his brakes failed. He wasn’t even speeding or anything. The Baptist Church gave my mamma a charity funeral. This same church, the Grace Baptist, sent me to the Children of Jesus Christ orphanage in Des Moines. This is a place that all sorts of churches chip together to support. That was where I learned to read and write…

He stopped there. His hand was aching from writing so much, but that wasn’t why. He felt uneasy, hot and uncomfortable at having to relive all that again. He went back to the jail quarters and looked in. Childress and Warner were asleep. Vince Hogan was standing by the bars, smoking a cigarette and looking across the corridor at the empty cell where Ray Booth would have been tonight if he hadn’t run so quick. Hogan looked as if he might have been crying, and that led him back in time to that small mute scrap of humanity, Nick Andros. There was a word he had learned at the movies as a kid. That word was INCOMMUNICADO. It was a word that had always had fantastic, Lovecraftian overtones to Nick, a fearful word that echoed and clanged in the brain, a word that inscribed all the nuances of fear that live only outside the sane universe and inside the human soul. He had been INCOMMUNICADO all his life.

He sat down and re-read the last line he’d written. That was where I learned to read and write. But it hadn’t been as simple as that. He lived in a silent world. Writing was code. Speech was the moving of lips, the rise and fall of teeth, the dance of a tongue. His mother had taught him to read lips, and had taught him how to write his name in struggling, sprawling letters. That’s your name, she had said. That’s you, Nicky. But of course she had said it silently, meaninglessly. The prime connection had come when she tapped the paper, then tapped his chest. The worst part about being deaf-mute was not living in the silent movie world; the worst part was not knowing the names of things. He had not really begun to understand the concept of naming until he was four. He had not known that you called the tall green things trees until he was six: He had wanted to know, but no one had thought to tell him and he had no way to ask: he was INCOMMUNICADO.

When she died he had retreated almost all the way. The orphanage was a place of roaring silence where grim-faced thin boys made fun of his silence; two boys would run up to him, one boy with his hands plastered over his mouth, one boy with his hands plastered over his ears. If none of the staff happened to be near, they would punch him out. Why? No reason. Except that maybe in the vast white class of victims there is a subclass: the victims of victims.

He stopped wanting to communicate, and when that happened the thinking process itself began to rust and disintegrate. He began to wander from place to place vacantly, looking at the nameless things that filled the world. He watched groups of children in the play yard move their lips, raise and lower their teeth like white drawbridges, dance their tongues in the ritual mating of speech. He sometimes found himself looking at a single cloud for as long as an hour at a time.

Then Rudy had come. A big man with scars on his face and a bald head. Six feet, five inches tall, might as well have been twenty to runty Nick Andros. They met for the first time in a basement room where there was a table, six or seven chairs, and a TV that only worked when it felt like it. Rudy squatted, putting his eyes on approximately the same level as Nick’s. Then he took his huge, scarred hands and put them over his mouth, his ears.

I am a deaf-mute.

Nick turned his face sullenly away: Who gives a fuck?

Rudy slapped him.

Nick fell down. His mouth opened and silent tears began to leak from his eyes. He didn’t want to be here with this scarred troll, this bald boogey. He was no deaf-mute, it was a cruel joke.

Rudy pulled him gently to his feet and led him to the table. A blank sheet of paper was there. Rudy pointed at it, then at Nick. Nick stared sullenly at the paper and then at the bald man. He shook his head. Rudy nodded and pointed at the empty paper again. He produced a pencil and handed it to Nick. Nick put it down as if it were hot. He shook his head. Rudy pointed at the pencil, then at Nick, then at the paper. Nick shook his head. Rudy slapped him again.

More silent tears. The scarred face looking at him with nothing but deadly patience. Rudy pointed at the paper again. At the pencil. At Nick.

Nick grasped the pencil in his fist. He wrote the four words that he knew, calling them forth from the cobwebby, rusting mechanism that was in his thinking brain. He wrote:

NICHOLAS ANDROS

FUCK YOU

Then he broke the pencil in half and looked sullenly and defiantly at Rudy. But Rudy was smiling. Suddenly he reached across the table and held Nick’s head steady between his hard, callused palms. His hands were warm, gentle. Nick could not remember the last time he had been touched with such love. His mother had touched him like that.

Rudy removed his hands from Nick’s face. He picked up the half of the pencil with the point on it. He turned the paper over to the blank side. He tapped the empty white space with the tip of the pencil, and then tapped Nick. He did it again. And again. And again. And finally Nick understood.

You are this blank page.

Nick began to cry.

Rudy came for the next six years.

… where I learned to read and write. A man named Rudy Sparkman came to help me. I was very lucky to have him. In 1984 the orphanage went broke. They placed as many kids that they could, but I was not one of them. They said I would get in with a family after a while and the state would pay them for keeping me. I wanted to go with Rudy but Rudy was in Africa working for the Peace Corps.

So I ran away. Being sixteen, I don’t think they looked for me too hard. I figured if I could stay out of trouble I would be all right, and so far so good. I have been taking the high school correspondence courses one at a time, because Rudy always said education is the most important. When I settle down for a while I’m going to take that high-school equivalency test. I will be able to pass it soon. I like school. Maybe I will go to college someday. I know that sounds crazy, a deaf-mute bum like me, but I don’t think it’s impossible. Anyway, that’s my story.

Yesterday morning Baker had come in around seven-thirty while Nick was emptying wastebaskets. The sheriff looked better.

“How you feeling?” Nick wrote.

“Pretty good. I was burnin up until midnight. Worst fever I’ve had since I was a kid. Aspirin didn’t seem to help it. Janey wanted to call the doc, but around twelve-thirty the fever just broke. I slep like a log after that. How are you doing?”

Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.

“How’s our guests?”

Nick opened and closed his mouth several times in a mime jabbering. Looked furious. Made banging gestures on invisible bars.

Baker threw back his head and laughed, then sneezed several times.

“You ought to be on TV,” he said. “Did you write your life story down like you said you was gonna try to do?”

Nick nodded and handed the two sheets of longhand over. The sheriff sat down and read them carefully. When he was done he looked at Nick so long and so piercingly that Nick stared down at his feet for a moment, embarrassed and confused.

When he looked up again Baker said: “You’ve been on your own since you were sixteen? For six years?”

Nick nodded.

“And you’ve really taken all these high school courses?”

Nick wrote for some time on one of the memo sheets. “I was way behind because I started to read & write so late. When the orphanage closed I was just starting to catch up. I got six h.s. credits from there and another six since then from La Salle in Chicago. I learned about them from a matchbook cover. I need four more credits.”

“What courses do you still need?” Baker asked, then turned his head and shouted: “Shut up in there! You’ll get your hotcakes and coffee when I’m damned good and ready and not before!”

Nick wrote: “Geometry. Advanced math. Two years of a language. Those are the college requirements.”

“A language. You mean like French? German? Spanish?”

Nick nodded.

Baker laughed and shook his head. “Don’t that beat all. A deaf-mute learning to talk a foreign language. Nothing against you, boy. You understand that.”

Nick smiled and nodded.

“So why you been driftin around so much?”

“While I was still a minor I didn’t dare stay in one place for too long,” Nick wrote. “Afraid they’d try to stick me in another orphanage or something. When I got old enough to look for a steady job, times got worse. They said the stock-market crashed, or something, but since I’m deaf I didn’t hear it (ha-ha).”

“Most places would have just let you ramble on,” Baker said. “In hard times the milk of human kindness don’t flow so free, Nick. As for a steady job, I might be able to put you onto something around here, unless those boys soured you on Shoyo and Arkansas for good. But… we ain’t all like that.”

Nick nodded to show he understood.

“How’s your teeth? That was quite a shot in the mouth you took.”

Nick shrugged.

“Take any of those pain pills?”

Nick held up two fingers.

“Well, look, I got some paperwork to do on those boys. You go on with what you were doing. We’ll talk more later.”

Dr. Soames, the man who had almost hit Nick with his car, came by around 9:30 A.M. the same morning. He was a man of about sixty with shaggy white hair, a scrawny chicken neck, and very sharp blue eyes.

“Big John tells me you read lips,” he said. “He also says he wants to see you gainfully employed, so I guess I better make sure you’re not going to die on his hands. Take off your shirt.”

Nick unbuttoned his blue workshirt and took it off.

“Holy Jesus, lookitim,” Baker said.

“They did a job of work, all right.” Soames looked at Nick and said dryly, “Boy, you almost lost your left tit.” He pointed to a crescent-shaped scab just above the nipple. Nick’s belly and ribcage looked like a Canadian sunrise. Soames poked and prodded him and looked carefully into the pupils of his eyes. At last he examined the shattered remains of Nick’s front teeth, the only part of him that really hurt now, in spite of the spectacular bruises.

“That must hurt like a sonofabitch,” he said, and Nick nodded ruefully. “You’re gonna lose them,” Soames went on. “You—” He sneezed three times in quick succession. “Excuse me.”

He began to put his tools back into his black bag. “The prognosis is favorable, young man, barring strokes of lightning or further trips to Zack’s ginmill. Is your speaking problem physical, or does it come from being deaf?”

Nick wrote: “Physical. Birth defect.”

Soames nodded. “Damn shame. Got to think positive, though, and thank God that He didn’t decide to give your brains a stir while He was at it. Put your shirt on.”

Nick did. He liked Soames; in his way, he was very much like Rudy Sparkman, who had told him once that God had given all deaf-mute males an extra two inches below the waist to make up for the little bit He had subtracted from above the collarbones.

Soames said, “I’ll tell em to give you a refill on that pain medication down at the drugstore. Tell moneybags here to pay for it.”

“Ho-ho,” John Baker said.

“He’s got more dough stashed away in fruit jars than a hog has warts,” Soames went on. He sneezed again, wiped his nose, rummaged around in his bag, and brought out a stethoscope.

“You want to look out, Gramps, I’ll lock you up for drunk and disorderly,” Baker said with a smile.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Soames said. “You’ll open your mouth too wide one day and fall right in. Take off y’shirt, John, and let’s see if your boobs are as big as they used to be.”

“Take off my shirt? Why?”

“Because your wife wants me to look at you, that’s why. She thinks you’re a sick man and she doesn’t want you to get any sicker, God knows why. Ain’t I told her enough times that she and I wouldn’t have to sneak around anymore if you were underground? Come on, Johnny. Show us some skin.”

“It was just a cold,” Baker said, reluctantly unbuttoning his shirt. “I feel fine this morning. Honest to God, Ambrose, you sound worse’n I do.”

“You don’t tell the doctor, the doctor tells you.” As Baker pulled his shirt off, Soames turned to Nick and said, “But you know it’s funny how a cold will just start making the rounds. Mrs. Lathrop is down sick, and the whole Richie family, and most of those no-accounts out on the Barker Road are coughing their brains out. Even Billy Warner in there’s hacking away.”

Baker had wormed out of his undershirt.

“There, what’d I tell you?” Soames asked. “Ain’t he got a set of knockers on him? Even an old shit like me could get horny looking at that.”

Baker gasped as the stethoscope touched his chest. “Jesus, that’s cold! What do you do, keep it in a deep freeze?”

“Breathe in,” Soames said, frowning. “Now let it out.”

Baker’s exhale turned into a weak cough.

Soames kept at the sheriff for a long time. Front and back both. At last he put away his stethoscope and used a tongue depressor to look down Baker’s throat. Finished, he broke it in two and tossed it into the wastebasket.

“Well?” Baker said.

Soames pressed the fingers of his right hand into the flesh of Baker’s neck under the jaw. Baker winced away from it.

“I don’t have to ask if that hurt,” Soames said. “John, you go home and go to bed and that isn’t advice, that’s an order.”

The sheriff blinked. “Ambrose,” he said quietly, “come on. You know I can’t do that. I’ve got three prisoners who have to go up to Camden this afternoon. I left this kid with them last night, but I had no business doing it, and I won’t do it again. He’s mute. I wouldn’t have agreed to it last night if I had been thinking right.”

“You never mind them, John. You got problems of your own. It’s some kind of respiratory infection, a damn good one by the sound, and a fever to go with it. Your pipes are sick, Johnny, and to be perfectly frank, that’s no joke for a man who’s carrying around the extra meat you are. Go to bed. If you still feel okay tomorrow morning, get rid of them then. Better still, call the State Patrol to come down and get them.”

Baker looked apologetically at Nick. “You know,” he said, “I do feel kind of dragged out. Maybe some rest—”

“Go home and lie down,” Nick wrote. “I’ll be careful. Besides, I have to earn enough to pay for those pills.”

“Nobody works so hard for you as a junkie,” Soames said, and cackled.

Baker picked up the two sheets of paper with Nick’s background on them. “Could I take these home for Janey to read? She took a real shine to you, Nick.”

Nick scrawled on the pad, “Sure can. She’s very nice.”

“One of a kind,” Baker said, and sighed as he buttoned his shirt back up.

“This fever’s comin on strong again. Thought I had it licked.”

“Take aspirin,” Soames said, latching his bag. “It’s that glandular infection I don’t like.”

“There’s a cigar box in the bottom desk drawer,” Baker said. “Petty cash fund. You can go out for lunch and get your medication on the way. Those boys are more dildoes than desperadoes. They’ll be okay. Just leave a voucher for how much money you take. I’ll get in touch with the State Police and you’ll be shut of them by late this afternoon.”

Nick made a thumb-and-forefinger circle.

“I’ve been trusting you a lot on short notice,” Baker said soberly, “but Janey says it’s all right. You have a care.”

Nick nodded.

Jane Baker had come in around six yesterday evening with a covered dish supper and a carton of milk.

Nick wrote, “Thanks very much. How’s your husband?”

She laughed, a small woman with chestnut brown hair, dressed prettily in a checked shirt and faded jeans. “He wanted to come down himself, but I talked him out of it. His fever was up so high this afternoon that it scared me, but it’s almost normal tonight. I think it’s because of the State Patrol. Johnny’s never really happy unless he can be mad at the State Patrol.”

Nick looked at her quizzically.

“They told him they couldn’t send anybody down for his prisoners until nine tomorrow morning. They’ve had a bad sick-day, twenty or more troopers out. And a lot of the people who are on have been fetching people to the hospital up at Camden or even Pine Bluff. There’s a lot of this sickness around. I think Am Soames is a lot more worried than he’s letting on.”

She looked worried herself. Then she took the two folded sheets of memo paper from her breast pocket.

“This is quite a story,” she said quietly, handing the papers back to him. “You’ve had just about the worst luck of anyone I ever heard of. I think the way you’ve risen above your handicaps is admirable. And I have to apologize again for my brother.”

Nick, embarrassed, could only shrug.

“I hope you’ll stay on in Shoyo,” she said, standing. “My husband likes you, and I do, too. Be careful of those men in there.”

“I will,” Nick wrote. “Tell the sheriff I hope he feels better.”

“I’ll take him your good wishes.”

She left then, and Nick passed a night of broken rest, getting up occasionally to check on his three wards. Desperadoes they were not; by ten o’clock they were all sleeping. Two town fellows came in to check and make sure Nick was all right, and Nick noticed that both of them seemed to have colds.

He dreamed oddly, and all he could remember upon waking was that he seemed to have been walking through endless rows of green corn, looking for something and terribly afraid of something else that seemed to be behind him.

This morning he was up early, carefully sweeping out the back of the jail and ignoring Billy Warner and Mike Childress. As he went out, Billy called after him: “Ray’s gonna be back, you know. And when he catches you, you’re gonna wish you were blind as well as deaf and dumb!”

Nick, his back turned, missed most of this.

Back in the office, he picked up an old copy of Time magazine and began to read. He considered putting his feet up on the desk and decided that would be a very good way to get in trouble if the sheriff came by.

By eight o’clock he was wondering uneasily if Sheriff Baker might have had a relapse in the night. Nick had expected him by now, ready to turn the three prisoners in his jail over to the county when the State Patrol came for them. Also, Nick’s stomach was rumbling uncomfortably. No one had showed up from the truck-stop down the road, and he looked at the telephone, more with disgust than with longing. He was quite fond of science fiction, picking up falling-apart paperbacks from time to time on the dusty back shelves of antique barns for a nickel or a dime, and he found himself thinking, not for the first time, that it was going to be a great day for the deaf-mutes of the world when the telephone viewscreens the science fiction novels were always predicting finally came into general use.

By quarter of nine he was acutely uneasy. He went to the door which gave on the cells and looked in.

Billy and Mike were both standing at their cell doors. Both of them had been banging on the bars with their shoes… which just went to show you that people who can’t talk only made up a small percentage of the world’s dummies. Vince Hogan was lying down. He only turned his head and stared at Nick when he came to the door. Hogan’s face was pallid except for a hectic flush on his cheeks, and there were dark patches under his eyes. Beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. Nick met his apathetic, fevered gaze and realized that the man was sick. His uneasiness deepened.

“Hey, dummy, how about some brefus?” Mike called down to him. “An ole Vince there seems like he could use a doctor. Tattle-talein don’t agree with him, does it, Bill?”

Bill didn’t want to banter. “I’m sorry I yelled at you before, man. Vince, he’s sick, all right. He needs the doctor.”

Nick nodded and went out, trying to figure out what he should do next. He bent over the desk and wrote on the memo pad: “Sheriff Baker, or Whoever: I’ve gone to get the prisoners some breakfast and to see if I can hunt Dr. Soames up for Vincent Hogan. He appears to be really sick, not just playing possum. Nick Andros.”

He tore the sheet off the pad and left it in the middle of the desk. Then, tucking the pad into his pocket, he went out into the street.

The first thing that struck him was the still heat of the day and the smell of greenery. By afternoon it was going to be a scorcher. It was the sort of day when people like to get their chores and errands done early so they can spend the afternoon as quietly as possible, but to Nick, Shoyo’s main street looked strangely indolent this forenoon, more like a Sunday than a workday.

Most of the diagonal parking spaces in front of the stores were empty. A few cars and farm trucks were going up and down the street, but not many. The hardware store looked open, but the shades of the Mercantile Bank were still drawn, although it was past nine now.

Nick turned right, toward the truck-stop, which was five blocks down. He was on the corner of the third block when he saw Dr. Soames’s car moving slowly up the street toward him, weaving a little from side to side, as if with exhaustion. Nick waved vigorously, not sure if Soames would stop, but Soames pulled in at the curb, indifferently taking up four of the slanted parking spaces. He didn’t get out but merely sat behind the wheel. The look of the man shocked Nick. Soames had aged twenty years since he had last seen him bantering casually with the sheriff. It was partly exhaustion, but exhaustion couldn’t be the whole explanation—even Nick could see that. As if to confirm his thought, the doctor produced a wrinkled handkerchief from his breast pocket like an old magician doing a creaky trick that does not interest him much anymore, and sneezed into it repeatedly. When he was done he leaned his head back against the car’s seat, mouth half-open to draw breath. His skin looked so shiny and yellow that he reminded Nick of a dead person.

Then Soames opened his eyes and said, “Sheriff Baker’s dead. If that’s what you flagged me down for, you can forget it. He died a little after two o’clock this morning. Now Janey’s sick with it.”

Nick’s eyes widened. Sheriff Baker dead? But his wife had been in just last night and said he was feeling better. And she… she had been fine. No, it just wasn’t possible.

“Dead, all right,” Soames said, as though Nick had spoken his thought aloud. “And he’s not the only one. I’ve signed twelve death certificates in the last twelve hours. And I know of another twenty that are going to be dead by noon unless God shows mercy. But I doubt if this is God’s doing. I suspect He’ll keep right out of it as a consequence.”

Nick pulled the pad from his pocket and wrote: “What’s the matter with them?”

“I don’t know,” Soames said, crumpling the sheet slowly and tossing the ball into the gutter. “But everyone in town seems to be coming down with it, and I’m more frightened than I ever have been in my life. I have it myself, although what I’m suffering most from right now is exhaustion. I’m not a young man anymore. I can’t go these long hours without paying the price, you know.” A tired, frightened petulance had entered his voice, which Nick fortunately couldn’t hear. “And feeling sorry for myself won’t help.”

Nick, who hadn’t been aware Soames was feeling sorry for himself, could only look at him, puzzled.

Soames got out of his car, holding on to Nick’s arm for a minute to help himself. He had an old man’s grip, weak and a little frenzied. “Come on over to that bench, Nick. You’re good to talk to. I suppose you’ve been told that before.”

Nick pointed back toward the jail.

“They’re not going anywhere,” Soames said, “and if they’re down with it, right now they’re on the bottom of my list.”

They sat on the bench, which was painted bright green and bore an advertisement on the backrest for a local insurance company. Soames turned his face gratefully up to the warmth of the sun.

“Chills and fever,” he said. “Ever since about ten o’clock last night. Just lately it’s been the chills. Thank God there hasn’t been any diarrhea.”

“You ought to go home to bed,” Nick wrote.

“So I ought. And will. I just want to rest for a few minutes first…” His eyes slipped shut and Nick thought he had gone to sleep. He wondered if he should go on down to the truck-stop and get Billy and Mike some breakfast.

Then Dr. Soames spoke again, without opening his eyes. Nick watched his lips. “The symptoms are all very common,” he said, and began to enumerate them on his fingers until all ten were spread out in front of him like a fan. “Chills. Fever. Headache. Weakness and general debilitation. Loss of appetite. Painful urination. Swelling of the glands, progressing from minor to acute. Swelling in the armpits and in the groin. Respiratory weakness and failure.”

He looked at Nick.

“They are the symptoms of the common cold, of influenza, of pneumonia. We can cure all of those things, Nick. Unless the patient is very young or very old, or perhaps already weakened by a previous illness, antibiotics will knock them out. But not this. It comes on the patient quickly or slowly. It doesn’t seem to matter. Nothing helps. The thing escalates, backs up, escalates again; debilitation increases; the swelling gets worse; finally, death.

“Somebody made a mistake.

“And they’re trying to cover it up.”

Nick looked at him doubtfully, wondering if he had picked the words rightly from the doctor’s lips, wondering if Soames might be raving.

“It sounds slightly paranoid, doesn’t it?” Soames asked, looking at him with weary humor. “I used to be frightened of the younger generation’s paranoia, do you know that? Always afraid someone was tapping their phones… following them… running computer checks on them… and now I find out they were right and I was wrong. Life is a fine thing, Nick, but old age takes an unpleasantly high toll on one’s dearly held prejudices, I find.”

“What do you mean?” Nick wrote.

“None of the phones in Shoyo work,” Soames said. Nick had no idea if this was in answer to his question (Soames seemed to have given Nick’s last note only the most cursory of glances), or if the doctor had gone off on some new tack—the fever could be making Soames’s mind jump around, he supposed.

The doctor observed Nick’s puzzled face, and seemed to think the deaf-mute might not believe him. “Quite true,” he said. “If you try to dial any number not on this town’s circuit, you get a recorded announcement. Furthermore, the two Shoyo exits and entrances from the turnpike are closed off with barriers which say ROAD CONSTRUCTION. But there is no construction. Only the barriers. I was out there. I believe it would be possible to move the barriers aside, but the traffic on the turnpike seems very light this morning. And most of it seems to consist of army vehicles. Trucks and jeeps.”

“What about the other roads?” Nick wrote.

“Route 63 has been torn up at the east end of town to replace a culvert,” Soames said. “At the west end of town there appears to have been a rather nasty car accident. Two cars across the road, blocking it entirely. There are smudge pots out, but no sign of state troopers or wreckers.”

He paused, removed his handkerchief, and blew his nose.

“The men working on the culvert are going very slowly, according to Joe Rackman, who lives out that way. I was at the Rackmans’ about two hours ago, looking at their little boy, who is very ill indeed. Joe said that he thinks that the men at the culvert are in fact soldiers, though they’re dressed in state road crew coveralls and driving a state truck.”

Nick wrote: “How does he know?”

Standing up, Soames said: “Workmen rarely salute each other.”

Nick got up, too.

“Back roads?” he jotted.

“Possibly.” Soames nodded. “But I am a doctor, not a hero. Joe said he saw guns in the cab of that truck. Army-issue carbines. If one tried to leave Shoyo by the back roads and if they were watched, who knows? And what might one find beyond Shoyo? I repeat: someone made a mistake. And now they’re trying to cover it up. Madness. Madness. Of course the news of something like this will get out, and it won’t take long. And in the meantime, how many will die?”

Nick, frightened, only looked at Dr. Soames as he went back to his car and climbed slowly in.

“And you, Nick,” Soames said, looking out the window at him. “How do you feel? A cold? Sneezing? Coughing?”

Nick shook his head to each one.

“Will you try to leave town? I think you could, if you went by the fields.”

Nick shook his head and wrote, “Those men are locked up. I can’t just leave them. Vincent Hogan is sick but the other two seem okay. I’ll get them their breakfast and then go see Mrs. Baker.”

“You’re a thoughtful boy,” Soames said. “That’s rare. A boy in this degraded age who has a sense of responsibility is even rarer. She’d appreciate that, Nick, I know. Mr. Braceman, the Methodist minister, also said he would stop by. I’m afraid he’ll have a lot of calls to make before the day is over. You’ll be careful of those three you have locked up, won’t you?”

Nick nodded soberly.

“Good. I’ll try to drop by and check on you this afternoon.” He dropped the car into gear and drove away, looking weary and red-eyed and shriveled. Nick stared after him, his face troubled, and then began to walk down to the truck-stop again. It was open, but one of the two cooks was not in and three of the four waitresses hadn’t shown up for the seven-to-three shift. Nick had to wait a long time to get his order. When he got back to the jail, both Billy and Mike looked badly frightened. Vince Hogan was delirious, and by six o’clock that evening he was dead.

Chapter 19

It had been so long since Larry had been in Times Square that he expected it to look different somehow, magical. Things would look smaller and yet better there, and he would not feel intimidated by the rank, smelly, and sometimes dangerous vitality of the place the way he had as a child, when he and Buddy Marx or just he alone would scuttle down here to see the 99-cent double features or to stare at the glittering junk in the windows of the shops and arcades and poolhalls.

But it all looked just the same—more than it should have because some things really had changed. When you came up the stairs from the subway, the newsstand that had been on the corner as you came out was gone. Half a block down, where there had been a penny arcade full of flashing lights and bells and dangerous-looking young men with cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths as they played the Gottlieb Desert Isle or Space Race, where that had been there was now an Orange Julius with a flock of young blacks standing in front of it, their lower bodies moving gently as if somewhere jive played on and on, jive that only black ears could hear. There were more massage parlors and X-rated movies.

Still, it was much the same, and this made him sad. In a way the only real difference made things seem worse: he felt like a tourist here now. But maybe even native New Yorkers felt like tourists in the Square, dwarfed, wanting to look up and read the electronic headlines as they marched around and around up there. He couldn’t tell; he had forgotten what it was like to be a part of New York. He had no particular urge to relearn.

His mother hadn’t gone to work that morning. She’d been fighting a cold for the last couple of days and had gotten up early this morning with a fever. He had heard her from the narrow, safe bed in his old room, banging around out in the kitchen, sneezing and saying “Shit!” under her breath, getting ready for breakfast. The sound of the TV being turned on, then the news on the “Today” program. An attempted coup in India. A power station blown up in Wyoming. The Supreme Court was expected to hand down a landmark decision having to do with gay rights.

By the time Larry came out into the kitchen, buttoning his shirt, the news was over and Gene Shalitt was interviewing a man with a bald head. The man with the bald head was showing a number of small animals he had hand-blown. Glassblowing, he said, had been his hobby for forty years, and his book would be published by Random House. Then he sneezed. “Excuse you,” Gene Shalitt said, and chuckled.

“You want em fried or scrambled?” Alice Underwood asked. She was in her bathrobe.

“Scrambled,” Larry said, knowing it would do no good to protest the eggs. In Alice’s view, it wasn’t breakfast without eggs (which she called “crackleberries” when she was in a good humor). They had protein and nutrition. Her idea of nutrition was vague but all-encompassing. She kept a list of nutritious items in her head, Larry knew, as well as their opposite numbers—Jujubes, pickles, Slim Jims, the slice of pink bubble gum that came with baseball cards, and oh dear God, so many others.

He sat down and watched her make the eggs, pouring them into the same old black skillet, stirring them with the same wife whisk that she had used to stir his eggs when he had been going to the first grade at PS 162.

She pulled her hankie out of her bathrobe pocket, coughed into it, sneezed into it, and muttered “Shit!” indistinctly into it before putting it back.

“Day off, Mom?”

“I called in sick. This cold wants to break me. I hate to call in sick on Fridays, so many do, but I’ve got to get off my feet. I’m running a fever. Swollen glands, too.”

“Did you call the doctor?”

“When I was a charming maid, doctors made housecalls,” she said. “Now if you’re sick, you have to go to the hospital emergency room. That, or spend the day waiting for some quack to see you in one of those places where they’re supposed to have—ha-ha—walk-in medical care. Walk in and get ready to collect your Medicare, that’s what I think. Those places are worse than the Green Stamp Redemption Center a week before Christmas. I’ll stay home and take aspirin, and by tomorrow this time I’ll be on the downhill side of it.”

He stayed most of the morning, trying to help out. He lugged the TV in by her bed, the cords standing out heroically on his arms (“You’re going to give yourself a hernia so I can watch ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’” she sniffed), brought her juice and an old bottle of NyQuil for her stuffiness, and ran down to the market to get her a couple of paperbacks.

After that there wasn’t much for them to do except get on each other’s nerves. She marveled how much poorer the TV reception was in the bedroom and he had to bite back an acid comment to the effect that poor reception was better than no reception at all. Finally he said he might go out and see some of the city.

“That’s a good idea,” she said with obvious relief. “I’m going to take a nap. You’re a good boy, Larry.”

So he had gone down the narrow stairs (the elevator was still broken) and onto the street, feeling guilty relief. The day was his, and he still had some cash in his pocket.

But now, in Times Square, he didn’t feel so cheerful. He wandered along, his wallet long since transferred to a front pocket. He paused in front of a discount record store, transfixed by the sound of his own voice coming from the battered overhead speakers. The bridge verse.

I didn’t come to ask you to stay all night

Or to find out if you’ve seen the light

I didn’t come to make a fuss or pick a fight

I just want you to tell me if you think you can

Baby, can you dig your man?

Dig him, baby—

Baby, can you dig your man?

That’s me, he thought, looking vacantly in at the albums, but today the sound depressed him. Worse, it made him homesick. He didn’t want to be here under this gray washtub sky, smelling New York exhaust, one hand constantly playing pocket pool with his wallet to make sure it was still there. New York, thy name is paranoia. Suddenly where he wanted to be was in a West Coast recording studio, making a new album.

Larry quickened his step and turned in at an arcade. Bells and buzzers jangled in his ears; there was the amplified, ripping growl of a Deathrace 2000 game, complete with the unearthly, electronic screams of the dying pedestrians. Neat game, Larry thought, soon to be followed by Dachau 2000. They’ll love that one. He went to the change booth and got ten dollars in quarters. There was a working phone kiosk next to the Beef’n Brew across the street and he direct-dialed Jane’s Place from memory. Jane’s was a poker parlor where Wayne Stukey sometimes hung out.

Larry plugged quarters into the slot until his hand ached, and the phone began to ring three thousand miles away.

A female voice said, “Jane’s. We’re open.”

“To anything?” he asked, low and sexy.

“Listen, wise guy, this isn’t… hey, is this Larry?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Hi, Arlene.”

“Where are you? Nobody’s seen you, Larry.”

“Well, I’m on the East Coast,” he said cautiously. “Somebody told me there were bloodsuckers on me and I ought to get out of the pool until they dropped off.”

“Something about a big party?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard about that,” she said. “Big spender.”

“Is Wayne around, Arlene?”

“You mean Wayne Stukey?”

“I don’t mean John Wayne—he’s dead.”

“You mean you haven’t heard?”

“What would I hear? I’m on the other coast. Hey, he’s okay, isn’t he?”

“He’s in the hospital with this flu bug. Captain Trips, they’re calling it out here. Not that it’s any laughing matter. A lot of people have died with it, they say. People are scared, staying in. We’ve got six empty tables, and you know Jane’s never has empty tables.”

“How is he?”

“Who knows? They’ve got wards and wards of people and none of them can have visitors. It’s spooky, Larry. And there are lot of soldiers around.”

“On leave?”

“Soldiers on leave don’t carry guns or ride around in convoy trucks. A lot of people are really scared. You’re well off out where you are.”

“Hasn’t been anything on the news.”

“Out here there’s been a few things in the papers about getting flu boosters, that’s all. But some people are saying the army got careless with one of those little plague jars. Isn’t that creepy?”

“It’s just scare talk.”

“There’s nothing like it where you are?”

“No,” he said, and then thought of his mother’s cold. And hadn’t there been a lot of sneezing and hacking going on in the subway? He remembered thinking it sounded like a TB ward. But there were plenty of sneezes and runny noses to go around in any city. Cold germs are gregarious, he thought. They like to share the wealth.

“Janey herself isn’t in,” Arlene was saying. “She’s got a fever and swollen glands, she said. I thought that old whore was too tough to get sick.”

“Three minutes are up, signal when through,” the operator broke in.

Larry said: “Well, I’ll be coming back in a week or so, Arlene. We’ll get together.”

“Fine by me. I always wanted to go out with a famous recording star.”

“Arlene? You don’t by any chance know a guy named Dewey the Deck, do you?”

“Oh!” she said in a very startled way. “Oh wow! Larry!”

“What?”

“Thank God you didn’t hang up! I did see Wayne, just about two days before he went into the hospital. I forgot all about it! Oh, gee!”

“Well, what is it?”

“It’s an envelope. He said it was for you, but he asked me to keep it in my cash drawer for a week or so, or give it to you if I saw you. He said something like ‘He’s goddam lucky Dewey the Deck isn’t collecting it instead of him.’”

“What’s in it?” He switched the phone from one hand to the other.

“Just a minute. I’ll see.” There was a moment of silence, then ripping paper. Arlene said, “It’s a savings account book. First Commercial Bank of California. There’s a balance of… wow! Just over thirteen thousand dollars. If you ask me to go somewhere dutch, I’ll brain you.”

“You won’t have to,” he said, grinning. “Thanks, Arlene. Hang on to that for me, now.”

“No, I’ll throw it down a storm-drain. Asshole.”

“It’s so good to be loved.”

She sighed. “You’re too much, Larry. I’ll put it in an envelope with both our names on it. Then you can’t duck me when you come in.”

“I wouldn’t do that, sugar.”

They hung up and then the operator was there, demanding three more dollars for Ma Bell. Larry, still feeling the wide and foolish grin on his face, plugged it willingly into the slot.

He looked at the change still scattered on the phone booth’s shelf, picked out a quarter, and dropped it into the slot. A moment later his mother’s phone was ringing. Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it. He thought—no, he believed—that this was entirely the former. He wanted to relieve both of them with the news that he was solvent again.

The smile faded off his lips little by little. The phone was only ringing. Maybe she had decided to go in to work after all. He thought of her flushed, feverish face, and of her coughing and sneezing and saying “Shit!” impatiently into her handkerchief. He didn’t think she would have gone in. The truth was, he didn’t think she was strong enough to go in.

He hung up and absently removed his quarter from the slot when it clicked back. He went out, jingling the change in his hand. When he saw a cab he hailed it, and as the cab pulled back into the flow of traffic it began to spatter rain.

The door was locked and after knocking two or three times he was sure the apartment was empty. He had rapped loud enough to make someone on the floor above rap back, like an exasperated ghost. But he would have to go in and make sure, and he didn’t have a key. He turned to go down the stairs to Mr. Freeman’s apartment, and that was when he heard the low groan from behind the door.

There were three different locks on his mother’s door, but she was indifferent about using them all in spite of her obsession with the Puerto Ricans. Larry hit the door with his shoulder and it rattled loudly in its frame. He hit it again and the lock gave. The door swung back and banged off the wall.

“Mom?”

That groan again.

The apartment was dim; the day had grown dark very suddenly, and now there was thick thunder and the sound of rain had swelled. The living room window was half open, the white curtains bellying out over the table, then being sucked back through the opening and into the airshaft beyond. There was a glistening wet patch on the floor where the rain had come in.

“Mom, where are you?”

A louder groan. He went through into the kitchen, and thunder rumbled again. He almost tripped over her. She was lying on the floor, half in and half out of her bedroom.

“Mom! Jesus, Mom!”

She tried to roll over at the sound of his voice, but only her head would move, pivoting on the chin, coming to rest on the left cheek. Her breathing was stertorous and clogged with phlegm. But the worst thing, the thing he never forgot, was the way her visible eye rolled up to look at him, like the eye of a hog in a slaughtering pen. Her face was bright with fever.

“Larry?”

“Going to put you on your bed, Mom.”

He bent, locking his knees fiercely against the trembling that wanted to start up in them, and got her in his arms. Her housecoat fell open, revealing a wash-faded nightgown and fishbelly-white legs sewn with puffy varicose veins. Her heat was immense. That terrified him. No one could remain so hot and live. Her brains must be frying in her head.

As if to prove this, she said querulously: “Larry, go get your father. He’s in the bar.”

“Be quiet,” he said, distraught. “Just be quiet and go to sleep, Mom.”

“He’s in the bar with that photographer!” she said shrilly into the palpable afternoon darkness, and thunder cracked viciously outside. Larry’s body felt as if it was coated with slowly running slime. A cool breeze was moving through the apartment, coming from the half-open window in the living room. As if in response to it, Alice began to shiver and the flesh of her arms humped up in gooseflesh. Her teeth clicked. Her face was a full moon in the bedroom’s semidarkness. Larry scrambled the covers down, put her legs in, and pulled the blankets up to her chin. Still she shivered helplessly, making the top blanket quiver and quake. Her face was dry and sweatless.

“You go tell him I said come outta there! ” she cried, and then was silent, except for the heavy bronchial sound of her breathing.

He went back into the living room, approached the telephone, then detoured around it. He shut the window with a bang and then went back to the phone.

The books were on a shelf underneath the little table it sat on. He looked up the number of Mercy Hospital and dialed it while more thunder cracked outside. A stroke of lightning turned the window he’d just closed into a blue and white X-ray plate. In the bedroom his mother screamed breathlessly, chilling his blood.

The phone rang once, there was a buzzing sound, then a click. A mechanically bright voice said: “This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. Right now all of our circuits are busy. If you will hold, your call will be taken as soon as possible. Thank you. This is a recording made at Mercy General Hospital. At the time of your call—”

“We put the mopheads downstairs! ” his mother cried out. Thunder rolled. “Those Puerto Rickies don’t know nothing! ”

“—call will be taken as soon as—”

He thumped the phone down and stood over it, sweating. What kind of goddam hospital was that, where you got a fucking recorded announcement when your mother was dying? What was going on there?

Larry decided to go down and see if Mr. Freeman could watch her while he got over to the hospital. Or should he call a private ambulance? Christ, how come nobody knew about these things when they needed to know about them? Why didn’t they teach it in school?

In the bedroom his mother’s laborious breathing went on and on.

“I’ll be back,” he muttered, and went to the door. He was scared, terrified for her, but underneath another voice was saying things like: These things always happen to me. And: Why did it have to happen after I got the good news? And most despicable of all: How bad is this going to screw up my plans? How many things am I going to have to change around?

He hated that voice, wished it would die a quick, nasty death, but it just went on and on.

He ran down the stairs to Mr. Freeman’s apartment and thunder boomed through the dark clouds. As he reached the first-floor landing the door blew open and a curtain of rain swept in.

Chapter 20

The Harborside was the oldest hotel in Ogunquit. The view was not so good since they had built the new yacht club over on the other side, but on an afternoon like this, when the sky had been poxed with intermittent thunderstorms, the view was good enough.

Frannie had been sitting by the window for almost three hours, trying to write a letter to Grace Duggan, a high school chum who was now going to Smith. It wasn’t a confessional letter dealing with her pregnancy or the scene with her mother—writing about those things would do nothing but depress her, and she supposed Grace would hear soon enough from her own sources in town. She had only been trying to write a friendly letter. The bicycle trip Jesse and I took to Rangely in May with Sam Lothrop and Sally Wenscelas. The biology final I lucked out on. Peggy Tate’s (another high school friend and mutual acquaintance) new job as a Senate page. The impending marriage of Amy Lauder.

The letter just wouldn’t allow itself to be written. The interesting pyrotechnics of the day had played a part—how could you write while pocket thunderstorms kept coming and going over the water? More to the point, none of the news in the letter seemed precisely honest. It had twisted slightly, like a knife in the hand that gives you a superficial cut instead of peeling the potato as you had expected it to do. The bicycle trip had been jolly, but she and Jess were no longer on such jolly terms. She had indeed lucked out on her BY-7 final, but had not been lucky at all on the biology final that really counted. Neither she nor Grace had ever cared all that much for Peggy Tate, and Amy’s forthcoming nuptials, in Fran’s present state, seemed more like one of those ghastly sick jokes than an occasion of joy. Amy’s getting married but I’m having the baby, hah-hah-hah.

Feeling that the letter had to be finished if only so she wouldn’t have to wrestle with it anymore, she wrote:

I’ve got problems of my own, boy do I have problems, but I just don’t have the heart to write them all down. Bad enough just having to think about them! But I expect to see you by the Fourth, unless your plans have changed since your last letter. (One letter in six weeks? I was beginning to think someone had chopped your typing fingers off, kid!) When I see you I’ll tell you all. I could sure use your advice.

Believe in me and I’ll believe in you,

Fran

She signed her name with her customary flamboyant/comic scrawl, so it took up half of the remaining white space on the notesheet. Just doing that made her feel more like an imposter than ever. She folded it into the envelope and addressed it and put it against the mirror standing up. Finished business.

There. Now what?

The day was darkening again. She got up and walked restlessly around the room, thinking she ought to go out before it started to rain again, but where was there to go? A movie? She’d seen the only one in town. With Jesse. To Portland to look at clothes? No fun. The only clothes she could look at realistically these days were the ones with the elastic waistbands. Room for two.

She’d had three calls today, the first one good news, the second indifferent, the third bad. She wished they’d come in reverse order. Outside the rain had begun to fall, darkening the marina’s pier again. She decided she’d go out and walk and to hell with the impending rain. The fresh air, the summer damp, might make her feel better. She might even stop somewhere and have a glass of beer. Happiness in a bottle. Equilibrium, anyway.

The first call had been from Debbie Smith, in Somersworth. Fran was more than welcome, Debbie said warmly. In fact, she was needed. One of the three girls who had been sharing the apartment had moved out in May, had gotten a job in a warehousing firm as a secretary. She and Rhoda couldn’t swing the rent much longer without a third. “And we both come from big families,” Debbie said. “Crying babies don’t bother us.”

Fran said she’d be ready to move in by the first of July, and when she hung up she found warm tears coursing down her cheeks. Relief tears. If she could get away from this town where she had grown up, she thought she would be all right. Away from her mother, away from her father, even. The fact of the baby and her singleness would then assume some sort of sane proportion in her life. A large factor, surely, but not the only one. There was some sort of animal, a bug or a frog, she thought, that swelled up to twice its normal size when it felt threatened. The predator, in theory at least, saw this, got scared, and slunk off. She felt a little like that bug, and it was this whole town, the total environment (gestalt was maybe an even better word), that made her feel that way. She knew that nobody was going to make her wear a scarlet letter, but she also knew that for her mind to finish convincing her nerves of that fact, a break with Ogunquit was necessary. When she went out on the street she could feel people, not looking at her, but getting ready to look at her. The year-round residents, of course, not the summer people. The year-round residents always had to have someone to look at—a tosspot, a welfare slacker, The Kid from a Good Family who had been picked up shoplifting in Portland or Old Orchard Beach… or the girl with the levitating belly.

The second call, the so-so one, had been from Jess Rider. He had called from Portland and he had tried the house first. Luckily, he had gotten Peter, who gave him Fran’s telephone number at the Harborside with no editorial comment.

Still, almost the first thing he’d said was: “You got a lot of static at home, huh?”

“Well, I got some,” she said cautiously, not wanting to go into it. That would make them conspirators of a kind.

“Your mother?”

“Why do you say that?”

“She looks like the type that might freak out. It’s something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I’ll shoot yours.”

She was silent.

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to offend you.”

“You didn’t,” she said. His description was actually quite apt—surface-apt anyway—but she was still trying to get over the surprise of that verb, offend. It was a strange word to hear from him. Maybe there’s a postulate here, she thought. When your lover begins to talk about “offending” you, he’s not your lover anymore.

“Frannie, the offer still stands. If you say yes, I can get a couple of rings and be there this afternoon.”

On your bike, she thought, and almost giggled. A giggle would be a horrible, unnecessary thing to do to him, and she covered the phone for a second just to be sure it wasn’t going to escape. She had done more weeping and giggling in the last six days than she had done since she was fifteen and starting to date.

“No, Jess,” she said, and her voice was quite calm.

“I mean it!” he said with startling vehemence, as if he had seen her struggling with laughter.

“I know you do,” she said. “But I’m not ready to get married. I know that about me, Jess. It has nothing to do with you.”

“What about the baby?”

“I’m going to have it.”

“And give it up?”

“I haven’t decided.”

For a moment he was silent and she could hear other voices in other rooms. They had their own problems, she supposed. Baby, the world is a daytime drama. We love our lives, and so we look for the guiding light as we search for tomorrow.

“I wonder about that baby,” Jesse said finally. She really doubted if he did, but it was maybe the only thing he could have said that would cut her. It did.

“Jess—”

“So where are you going?” he asked briskly. “You can’t stay at the Harborside all summer. If you need a place, I can look around in Portland.”

“I’ve got a place.”

“Where, or am I not supposed to ask?”

“You’re not supposed to,” she said, and bit her tongue for not finding a more diplomatic way of saying it.

“Oh,” he said. His voice was queerly flat. Finally he said cautiously, “Can I ask you something and not piss you off, Frannie? Because I really want to know. It’s not a rhetorical question or anything.”

“You can ask,” she agreed warily. Mentally she did gird herself not to be pissed off, because when Jess prefaced something like that, it was usually just before he came out with some hideous and totally unaware piece of chauvinism.

“Don’t I have any rights in this at all?” Jess asked. “Can’t I share the responsibility and the decision?”

For a moment she was pissed off, and then the feeling was gone. Jess was just being Jess, trying to protect his image of himself to himself, the way all thinking people do so they can get to sleep at night. She had always liked him for his intelligence, but in a situation like this, intelligence could be a bore. People like Jess—and herself, too—had been taught all their lives that the good thing to do was commit and be active. Sometimes you had to hurt yourself—and badly—to find out it could be better to lie back in the tall weeds and procrastinate. His toils were kind, but they were still toils. He didn’t want to let her get away.

“Jesse,” she said, “neither of us wanted this baby. We agreed on the pill so the baby, wouldn’t happen. You don’t have any responsibility.”

“But—”

“No, Jess,” she said, quite firmly.

He sighed.

“Will you get in touch when you get settled?”

“I think so.”

“Are you still planning to go back to school?”

“Eventually. I’m going to take the fall semester off. Maybe with something CED.”

“If you need me, Frannie, you know where I’ll be. I’m not running out.”

“I know that, Jesse.”

“If you need dough—”

“Yes.”

“Get in touch. I won’t press you, but… I’ll want to see you.”

“All right, Jess.”

“Goodbye, Fran.”

“Goodbye.”

When she hung up the goodbyes had seemed too final, the conversation unfinished. It struck her why. They had not added “I love you,” and that was a first. It made her sad and she told herself not to be, but the telling didn’t help.

The last call had come around noon, and it was from her father. They had had lunch the day before yesterday, and he told her he was worried about the effect this was having on Carla. She hadn’t come to bed last night; she had spent it in the parlor, poring over the old genealogical records. He had gone in around eleven-thirty to ask her when she was coming up. Her hair had been down, flowing over her shoulders and the bodice of her nightgown, and Peter said she looked wild and not strictly in touch with things. That heavy book was on her lap and she hadn’t even looked up at him, only continued to turn the pages. She said she wasn’t sleepy. She would be up in a while. She had a cold, Peter told her as they sat in a booth at the Corner Lunch, more looking at hamburgers than eating them. The sniffles. When Peter asked her if she would like a glass of hot milk, she didn’t answer at all. He had found her yesterday morning asleep in the chair, the book on her lap.

When she finally woke up she had seemed better, more herself, but her cold was worse. She dismissed the idea of having Dr. Edmonton in, saying it was just a chest cold. She had put Vicks on her chest, and a flannel square of cloth, and she thought her sinuses were clearing already. But Peter hadn’t cared for the way she looked, he told Frannie. Although she refused to let him take her temperature, he thought she was running a couple of degrees of fever.

He had called Fran today just after the first thunderstorm had begun. The clouds, purple and black, had piled up silently over the harbor, and the rain began, at first gentle and then torrential. As they talked she could look out her window and see the lightning stab down at the water beyond the breakwater, and each time it happened there would be a little scratching noise on the wire, like a phonograph needle digging a record.

“She’s in bed today,” Peter said. “She finally agreed to let Tom Edmonton take a look at her.”

“Has he been yet?”

“He just left. He thinks she’s got the flu.”

“Oh, Lord,” Frannie said, closing her eyes. “That’s no joke for a woman her age.”

“No, it isn’t.” He paused. “I told him everything, Frannie. About the baby, about the fight you and Carla had. Tom’s taken care of you since you were a baby yourself, and he keeps his lip buttoned. I wanted to know if that could have caused this. He said no. Flu is flu.”

“Flu made who,” Fran said bleakly.

“Pardon?”

“Never mind,” Fran said. Her father was amazingly broadminded, but an AC/DC fan he was not. “Go on.”

“Well, there’s not much further to go, hon. He said there’s a lot of it around. A particularly nasty breed. It seems to have migrated out of the south, and New York is swamped with it.”

“But sleeping in the parlor all night—” she began doubtfully.

“Actually, he said being in an upright position was probably better for her lungs and her bronchial tubes. He didn’t say anything else, but Alberta Edmonton belongs to all the organizations Carla belongs to, so he didn’t have to. Both of us knew she’s been inviting something like this, Fran. She’s president of the Town Historical Committee, she’s spending twenty hours a week in the library, she’s secretary of the Women’s Club and the Lovers of Literature Club, she’s been running the March of Dimes here in town since before Fred died, and last winter she took on the Heart Fund, for good measure. On top of all that she’s been trying to drum up interest in a Southern Maine Genealogical Society. She’s run down, worn out. And that’s part of the reason she blew up at you. All Edmonton said was that she had the welcome mat out for the first evil germ that passed her way. That’s all he had to say. Frannie, she’s getting old and she doesn’t want to. She’s been working harder than I have.”

“How sick is she, Daddy?”

“She’s in bed, drinking juice and taking the pills that Tom prescribed. I took the day off, and Mrs. Halliday is going to come in and sit with her tomorrow. She wants Mrs. Halliday so they can work out an agenda for the July meeting of the Historical Society.” He sighed windily and lightning scratched the wire again. “I sometimes think she wants to die in harness.”

Timidly, Fran said: “Do you think she’d mind if I—”

“Right now she would. But give her time, Fran. She’ll come around.”

Now, four hours later, tying her rain scarf over her hair, she wondered if her mother would come around. Maybe if she gave up the baby, no one in town would ever get wind of it. That was unlikely, though. In small towns people scent the wind with noses of uncommon keenness. And of course if she kept the baby… but she wasn’t really thinking of that, was she? Was she?

She could feel guilt working in her as she pulled on her light coat. Her mother was run down, of course she was. Fran had seen that when she came home from college and the two of them exchanged kisses on the cheek. Carla had bags under her eyes, her skin looked too yellow, and the gray in her hair, which was always beauty-shop-neat, had progressed visibly in spite of the thirty-dollar rinses. But still…

She had been hysterical, absolutely hysterical. And Frannie was left asking herself exactly how she was going to assess responsibility if her mother’s flu developed into pneumonia, or if she had some kind of breakdown. Or even died. God, what an awful thought. That couldn’t happen, please God no, of course not. The drugs she was taking would knock it out, and once Frannie was out of her line of visibility and incubating her little stranger quietly in Somersworth, her mother would recover from the knock she had been forced to take. She would—

The phone began to ring.

She looked at it blankly for a moment, and outside more lightning flickered, followed by a clap of thunder so close and vicious that she jumped, wincing.

Jangle, jangle, jangle.

But she had had her three calls, who else could it be? Debbie wouldn’t need to call her back, and she didn’t think Jess would, either. Maybe it was “Dialing for Dollars.” Or a Saladmaster salesman. Maybe it was Jess after all, giving it the old college try.

As she went to pick it up, she felt sure it was her father and that the news would be worse. It’s a pie, she told herself. Responsibility is a pie. Some of the responsibility goes with all the charity work she does, but you’re only kidding if you think you’re not going to have to cut a big, juicy, bitter piece for yourself. And eat every bite.

“Hello?”

There was nothing but silence for a moment and she frowned, puzzled, and said hello again.

Then her father said, “Fran?” and made a strange, gulping sound. “Frannie?” That gulping sound again and Fran realized with dawning horror that her father was fighting back tears. One of her hands crept to her throat and clutched at the knot where the rain scarf was tied.

“Daddy? What is it? Is it Mom?”

“Frannie, I’ll have to pick you up. I’ll… just swing by and pick you up. That’s what I’ll do.”

“Is Mom all right?” she screamed into the phone. Thunder whacked over the Harborside again and frightened her and she began to cry. “Tell me, Daddy!”

“She got worse, that’s all I know,” Peter said. “About an hour after I talked to you she got worse. Her fever went up. She started to rave. I tried to get Tom… and Rachel said he was out, that a lot of people were really sick… so I called the Sanford Hospital and they said their ambulances were out on calls, both of them, but they’d add Carla to the list. The list, Frannie, what the hell is this list, all of a sudden? I know Jim Warrington, he drives one of the Sanford ambulances, and unless there’s a car wreck on 95 he sits around and plays gin rummy all day. What’s this list?” He was nearly screaming.

“Calm down, Daddy. Calm down. Calm down.” She burst into tears again and her hand left the knot in her scarf and went to her eyes. “If she’s still there, you better take her yourself.”

“No… no, they came about fifteen minutes ago. And Christ, Frannie, there were six people in the back of that ambulance. One of them was Will Ronson, the man who runs the drugstore. And Carla… your mother… she came out of it a little as they put her in and she just kept saying, ‘I can’t catch my breath, Peter, I can’t catch my breath, why can’t I breathe?’ Oh, Christ,” he finished in a breaking, childish voice that frightened her.

“Can you drive, Daddy? Can you drive over here?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, sure.” He seemed to be pulling himself together.

“I’ll be on the front porch.”

She hung up and went down the stairs quickly, her knees trembling. On the porch she saw that, although it was still raining, the clouds of this latest thundershower were already breaking up and late afternoon sun was beaming through. She looked automatically for the rainbow and saw it, far out over the water, a misty and mystic crescent. Guilt gnawed and worried at her, furry bodies inside her belly, in where that other thing was, and she began to cry again.

Eat your pie, she told herself as she waited for her father to come. It tastes terrible, so eat your pie. You can have seconds, even thirds. Eat your pie, Frannie, eat every bite.

Chapter 21

Stu Redman was frightened.

He looked out the barred window of his new room in Stovington, Vermont, and what he saw was a small town far below, miniature gas station signs, some sort of mill, a main street, a river, the turnpike, and beyond the turnpike the granite backbone of far western New England—the Green Mountains.

He was frightened because this was more like a jail cell than a hospital room. He was frightened because Denninger was gone. He hadn’t seen Denninger since the whole crazy three-ring circus moved from Atlanta to here. Deitz was gone, too. Stu thought that maybe Denninger and Deitz were sick, perhaps dead already.

Somebody had slipped. Either that, or the disease that Charles D. Campion had brought to Arnette was a lot more communicable than anyone had guessed. Either way, the integrity of the Atlanta Plague Center had been breached, and Stu thought that everyone who had been there was now getting a chance to do a little firsthand research on the virus they called A-Prime or the superflu.

They still did tests on him here, but they seemed desultory. The schedule had become slipshod. Results were scrawled down and he had a suspicion that someone looked at them cursorily, shook his head, and dumped them in the nearest shredder.

That wasn’t the worst, though. The worst was the guns. The nurses who came in to take blood or spit or urine were now always accompanied by a soldier in a white-suit, and the soldier had a gun in a plastic Baggie. The Baggie was fastened over the wrist of the soldier’s right gauntlet. The gun was an army-issue .45, and Stu had no doubt that, if he tried any of the games he had tried with Deitz, the .45 would tear the end of the Baggie into smoking, burning shreds and Stu Redman would become a Golden Oldie.

If they were just going through the motions now, then he had become expendable. Being under detention was bad. Being under detention and being expendable… that was very bad.

He watched the six o’clock news very carefully every night now. The men who had attempted the coup in India had been branded “outside agitators” and shot. The police were still looking for the person or persons who had blown a power station in Laramie, Wyoming, yesterday. The Supreme Court had decided 6–3 that known homosexuals could not be fired from civil service jobs. And for the first time, there had been a whisper of other things.

AEC officials in Miller County, Arkansas, had denied there was any chance of a reactor meltdown. The atomic power plant in the small town of Fouke, about thirty miles from the Texas border, had been plagued with minor circuitry problems in the equipment that controlled the pile’s cooling cycle, but there was no cause for alarm. The army units in that area were merely a precautionary measure. Stu wondered what precautions the army could take if the Fouke reactor did indeed go China Syndrome. He thought the army might be in southwestern Arkansas for other reasons altogether. Fouke wasn’t all that far from Arnette.

Another item reported that an East Coast flu epidemic seemed to be in the early stages—the Russian strain, nothing to really worry about except for the very old and the very young. A tired New York City doctor was interviewed in a hallway of Brooklyn’s Mercy Hospital. He said the flu was exceptionally tenacious for Russian-A, and he urged viewers to get flu boosters. Then he suddenly started to say something else, but the sound cut off and you could only see his lips moving. The picture cut back to the newscaster in the studio, who said: “There have been some reported deaths in New York as a result of this latest flu outbreak, but contributing causes such as urban pollution and perhaps even the AIDS virus have been present in many of those fatal cases. Government health officials emphasize that this is Russian-A flu, not the more dangerous Swine flu. In the meantime, old advice is good advice, the doctors say: stay in bed, get lots of rest, drink fluids, and take aspirin for the fever.”

The newscaster smiled reassuringly… and off-camera, someone sneezed.

The sun was touching the horizon now, tinting it a gold that would turn to red and fading orange soon. The nights were the worst. They had flown him to a part of the country that was alien to him, and it was somehow more alien at night. In this early summer season the amount of green he could see from his window seemed abnormal, excessive, a little scary. He had no friends; as far as he knew all the people who had been on the plane with him when it flew from Braintree to Atlanta were now dead. He was surrounded by automatons who took his blood at gunpoint. He was afraid for his life, although he still felt fine and had begun to believe he wasn’t going to catch It, whatever It was.

Thoughtfully, Stu wondered if it would be possible to escape from here.

Chapter 22

When Creighton came in on June 24, he found Starkey looking at the monitors, his hands behind his back. He could see the old man’s West Point ring glittering on his right hand, and he felt a wave of pity for him. Starkey had been cruising on pills for ten days, and he was close to the inevitable crash. But, Creighton thought, if his suspicion about the phone call was correct, the real crash had already occurred.

“Len,” Starkey said, as if surprised. “Good of you to come in.”

“De nada,” Creighton said with a slight smile.

“You know who that was on the phone.”

“It was really him, then?”

“The President, yes. I’ve been relieved. The dirty alderman relieved me, Len. Of course I knew it was coming. But it still hurts. Hurts like hell. It hurts coming from that grinning, gladhanding sack of shit.”

Len Creighton nodded.

“Well,” Starkey said, passing a hand over his face. “It’s done. Can’t be undone. You’re in charge now. He wants you in Washington as soon as you can get there. He’ll have you on the carpet and he’ll chew your ass to a bloody rag, but you just stand there and yessir him and take it. We’ve salvaged what we can. It’s enough. I’m convinced it’s enough.”

“If so, this country ought to get down on its knees to you.”

“The throttle burned my hand, but I… I held it as long as I could, Len. I held it.” He spoke with quiet vehemence, but his eyes wandered back to the monitor, and for a moment his mouth quivered infirmly. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Well… we go back a country mile or three, Billy, don’t we?”

“You can say that again, soldier. Now—listen. One thing is top priority. You’ve got to see Jack Cleveland, first chance you get. He knows who we’ve got behind both curtains, iron and bamboo. He knows how to get in touch with them, and he won’t stick at what has to be done. He’ll know it’ll have to be quick.”

“I don’t understand, Billy.”

“We have to assume the worst,” Starkey said, and a queer grin came over his face. It lifted his upper lip and made it wrinkle like the snout of a dog protecting a farmyard. He pointed a finger at the sheets of yellow flimsy on the table. “It’s out of control now. It’s popped up in Oregon, Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida. Tentative cases in Mexico and Chile. When we lost Atlanta, we lost the three men best equipped to deal with the problem. We’re getting exactly nowhere with Mr. Stuart ‘Prince’ Redman. Did you know they actually injected him with the Blue virus? He thought it was a sedative. He killed it, and no one has the slightest idea how. If we had six weeks, we might be able to turn the trick. But, we don’t. The flu story is the best one, but it is imperative—imperative —that the other side never sees this as an artificial situation created in America. It might give them ideas.

“Cleveland has between eight and twenty men and women in the U.S.S.R. and between five and ten in each of the European satellite countries. Not even I know how many he has in Red China.” Starkey’s mouth was trembling again. “When you see Cleveland this afternoon, all you need tell him is Rome falls. You won’t forget?”

“No,” Len said. His—lips felt curiously cold. “But do you really expect that they’ll do it? Those men and women?”

“Our people got those vials one week ago. They believe they contain radioactive particles to be charted by our Sky-Cruise satellites. That’s all they need to know, isn’t it, Len?”

“Yes, Billy.”

“And if things do go from bad to… to worse, no one will ever know. Project Blue was uninfiltrated to the very end, we’re sure of that. A new virus, a mutation… our opposite numbers may suspect, but there won’t be time enough. Share and share alike, Len.”

“Yes.”

Starkey was looking at the monitors again. “My daughter gave me a book of poems some years ago. By a man named Yeets. She said every military man should read Yeets. I think it was her idea of a joke. You ever heard of Yeets, Len?”

“I think so,” Creighton said, considering and rejecting the idea of telling Starkey the man’s name was pronounced Yates.

“I read every line,” Starkey said, as he peered into the eternal silence of the cafeteria. “Mostly because she thought I wouldn’t. It’s a mistake to become too predictable. I didn’t understand much of it—I believe the man must have been crazy—but I read it. Funny poetry. Didn’t always rhyme. But there was one poem in that book that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind. It seemed as if that man was describing everything I dedicated my life to, its hopelessness, its damned nobility. He said that things fall apart. He said the center doesn’t hold. I believe he meant that things get flaky, Len. That’s what I believe he meant. Yeets knew that sooner or later things get goddam flaky around the edges even if he didn’t know anything else.”

“Yes, sir,” Creighton said quietly.

“The end of it gave me goosebumps the first time I read it, and it still does. I’ve got that part by heart. ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’”

Creighton stood silent. He had nothing to say.

“The beast is on its way,” Starkey said, turning around. He was weeping and grinning. “It’s on its way, and it’s a good deal rougher than that fellow Yeets ever could have imagined. Things are falling apart. The job is to hold as much as we can for as long as we can.”

“Yes, sir,” Creighton said, and for the first time he felt the sting of tears in his own eyes. “Yes, Billy.”

Starkey put out his hand and Creighton took it in both of his own. Starkey’s hand was old and cold, like the shed skin of a snake in which some small prairie animal has died, leaving its own fragile skeleton within the husk of the reptile. Tears overspilled the lower arcs of Starkey’s eyes and ran down his meticulously shaved cheeks.

“I have business to attend to,” Starkey said.

“Yes, sir.”

Starkey slipped his West Point ring off his right hand and his wedding band off his left. “For Cindy,” he said. “For my daughter. See that she gets them, Len.”

“I will.”

Starkey went to the door.

“Billy?” Len Creighton called after him.

Starkey turned.

Creighton stood ramrod straight, the tears still running down his own cheeks. He saluted.

Starkey returned it and then stepped out the door.

The elevator hummed efficiently, marking off the floors. An alarm began to hoot—mournfully, as if it somehow knew it was warning of a situation which had already become a lost cause—when he used his special key to open it at the top, so he could enter the motor-pool area. Starkey imagined Len Creighton watching him on a succession of monitors as he first picked out a jeep and then drove it across the desert floor of the sprawling test site and through a gate marked HIGH SECURITY ZONE NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT SPECIAL CLEARANCE. The checkpoints looked like turnpike tollbooths. They were still manned, but the soldiers behind the yellowish glass were dead and rapidly mummifying in the dry desert heat. The booths were bulletproof, but they hadn’t been germproof. Their glazed and sunken eyes stared vacantly at Starkey as he motored past, the only moving thing along the tangle of dirt roads among the Quonset huts and low cinderblock buildings.

He stopped outside a squat blockhouse with a sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT A-1-A CLEARANCE on the door. He used one key to get in, and another to summon the elevator. A guard, dead as a doornail and stiff as a poker, stared at him from the glass-encased security station to the left of the elevator doors. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, Starkey stepped in quickly. He seemed to feel the gaze of the dead guard on him, a small weight of eyes like two dusty stones.

The elevator sank so rapidly his stomach turned over. A bell dinged softly when it came to a halt. The doors slid open, and the sweet odor of decay hit him like a soft slap. It wasn’t too strong because the air purifiers were still working, but not even the purifiers could dispose of that smell completely. When a man has died, he wants you to know about it, Starkey thought.

There were almost a dozen bodies sprawled in front of the elevator. Starkey minced among them, not wanting to tread on a decaying, waxy hand or trip over an outstretched leg. That might make him scream, and he most definitely didn’t want to do that. You didn’t want to scream in a tomb because the sound of it might drive you mad, and that’s exactly where he was: in a tomb. It looked like a well-financed scientific research project, but what it really was now was a tomb.

The elevator doors slid shut behind him; there was a hum as it began to go up automatically. It wouldn’t come down again unless somebody else keyed it, Starkey knew; as soon as the installation’s integrity had been breached, the computers had switched all the elevators to the general containment program. Why were these poor men and women lying here? Obviously they had been hoping the computers would fuck up the switch-over to the emergency procedures. Why not? It even had a certain logic. Everything else had fucked up.

Starkey walked down the corridor which led to the cafeteria, his heels clicking hollowly. Above, the fluorescents embedded in their long fixtures like inverted ice-cube trays threw a hard, shadowless light. There were more bodies. A man and a woman with their clothes off and holes in their heads. They screwed, Starkey thought, and then he shot her, and then he shot himself. Love among the viruses. The pistol, an army-issue .45, was still clutched in his hand. The tile floor was spotted with blood and gray stuff that looked like oatmeal. He felt a terrible and thankfully transient urge to bend down and touch the dead woman’s breasts, to see if they were hard or flaccid.

Farther down the hall a man sat with his back propped against a closed door, a sign tied around his neck with a shoelace. His chin had fallen forward, obscuring what was written there. Starkey put his fingers under the man’s chin and pushed his head back. As he did so, the man’s eyeballs fell back into his head with a meaty little thud. The words on the sign had been written in red Magic Marker. NOW YOU KNOW IT WORKS, the sign said. ANY QUESTIONS?

Starkey let go of the man’s chin. The head remained cocked at its stiff angle, the dark eye sockets staring raptly upward. Starkey stepped back. He was crying again. He suspected he was crying because he didn’t have any questions.

The cafeteria doors were propped open. Outside them was a large cork bulletin board. There was to have been a league bowl-off on June 20, Starkey saw. The Grim Gutterballers vs. The First Strikers for the Project championship. Also, Anna Floss wanted a ride to Denver or Boulder on July 9. She would share driving and expenses. Also, Richard Betts wanted to give away some friendly pups, half collie and half St. Bernard. Also, there were weekly nondenominational religious services in the caf.

Starkey read every announcement on the bulletin board, and then he went inside.

The smell in here was worse—rancid food as well as dead bodies. Starkey looked around with dull horror.

Some of them seemed to be looking at him.

“Men—” Starkey said, and then choked. He had no idea what he had been about to say.

He walked slowly over to where Frank D. Bruce lay with his face in his soup. He looked down at Frank D. Bruce for several moments. Then he pulled Frank D. Bruce’s head up by the hair. The soup bowl came with him, still stuck on his face by soup which had long since congealed, and Starkey struck at it in horror, finally knocking it off. The bowl clunked to the floor, upside down. Most of the soup still clung to Frank D. Bruce’s face like moldy jelly. Starkey produced his handkerchief and wiped off as much of it as he could. Frank D. Bruce’s eyes appeared to be gummed shut by soup, but Starkey forbore to wipe the lids. He was afraid Frank D. Bruce’s eyes would fall back into his skull, like the eyes of the man with the sign. He was even more afraid that the lids, freed of the glue which held them, might roll up like windowshades. He was mostly afraid of what the expression in Frank D. Bruce’s eyes might be.

“Private Bruce,” Starkey said softly, “at ease.”

He put the handkerchief carefully over the face of Frank D. Bruce. It stuck there. Starkey turned and walked out of the cafeteria in long, even strides, as if on a parade ground.

Halfway back to the elevator he came to the man with the sign around his neck. Starkey sat down beside him, loosened the strap over the butt of his pistol, and put the barrel of the gun into his mouth.

When, the shot came, it was muffled and undramatic. None of the corpses took the slightest notice. The air purifiers took care of the puff of smoke. In the bowels of Project Blue, there was silence. In the cafeteria, Starkey’s handkerchief came unstuck from Private Frank D. Bruce’s face and wafted to the floor. Frank D. Bruce did not seem to mind, but Len Creighton found himself looking into the monitor which showed Bruce more and more often, and wondering why in hell Billy couldn’t have gotten the soup out of the man’s eyebrows while he was at it. He was going to have to face the President of the United States soon, very soon, but the soup congealing in Frank D. Bruce’s eyebrows worried him more. Much more.

Chapter 23

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. From New Orleans to Nogales, from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, 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. And wasn’t it fine?

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 made 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 sharp-toed cowboy boots clocking on the pavement; a tall man of no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket. His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature—pamphlets for all seasons, rhetoric for all reasons. 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-Contra-cocaine connection, the farm workers’ unions, 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 red letters which dripped to simulate blood: 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 Scout 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 truck-stop 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 porno novel, or maybe Mein Kampf, or an R. Crumb comic book, or one of the baying reactionary position papers from the America Firsters or the Sons of the Patriots. When it came to the printed word, Flagg was an equal opportunity reader.

After supper he would commence walking again, walking 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 spines. 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 and some clean papers and then 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 or everywhere—heart, liver, lights, brain. He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate—they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.

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 unwanted 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 gaze upon his dark and grinning face at an oblique angle. The women he took to bed with him, even if they 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 countenance. 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 alive—narcoleptic, to be sure, but still possessed of a certain hideous vitality. He was in his late fifties now, but Bradenton had been dismissed from one California college twenty-some 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 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 large 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 he 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; those power merchants 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 kidnapping of an heiress, and it had been he who suggested that the heiress be made crazy instead of simply ransomed. He had left the small Los Angeles house where DeFreeze and the others had fried not twenty minutes before the police moved in; 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, a grin that made pregnant women feel premature labor pains. And later, when a few tattered remnants of the group were swept up, all they knew was there had been someone else associated with the group, maybe someone important, maybe a hanger-on, a man of no age, a man called the Walkin Dude, or sometimes the Boogeyman.

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. Already the charcoal was hot, white and flaky outside, as red as demons’ eyes inside. A huge thing, a great thing.

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?

He closed his eyes, his hot face turning up slightly to the dark sky, which was prepared to receive the dawn. He concentrated. Smiled. The dusty, rundown heels of, his boots began to rise off the road. An inch. Two. Three inches. The smile broadened into a grin. Now he was a foot up And two feet off the ground, he hung steady over the road with a little dust blowing beneath him.

Then he felt the first inches of dawn stain the sky, and he lowered himself down again. The time was not yet.

But the time was soon.

He began to walk again, grinning, now looking for a place to lay up for the day. The time was soon, and that was enough to know for now.

Chapter 24

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! ”

“Cheap mouthy bastards,” the guard with the runny nose muttered, and then sneezed.

Lloyd grinned happily. He was dazzled by his new fame. It sure wasn’t much like Brownsville had been. Even the food was better. When you got to be a heavy hitter, you got some respect. He imagined that Tom Cruise must feel something like this at a world premiere.

At the end of the hall 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 like that guy Papillon in the movies.

“Okay,” the one with the runny nose said, and another guard, this one in a booth made of bulletproof glass, waved them on. They walked down another hall, this one painted industrial green. It was very quiet in here; the only sounds were the guards’ clicking footfalls (Lloyd himself was wearing paper slippers) and the asthmatic wheeze from Lloyd’s right. At the far end of the hall, another guard was waiting 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 your wee-wees 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 up. Two days in the joint and he could feel that old stir-stupor coming on him already.

“You’re gonna lose a tooth for that,” the door-guard said. “Exactly one, count it, one tooth.”

“Hey, now, listen, you can’t—”

“Yes I can. There are guys on the yard who would kill their dear old mothers for two cartons of Chesterfields, scumbucket. Would you care to try for two teeth?”

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: When they had you nailed, you just had to close your eyes and grit your teeth.

“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, and gave Lloyd a stony stare.

“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, let’s get rid of him so we can get back to swapping dirty stories with the judge. But maybe this guy could get him a straight ten, armed robbery. Maybe even time served. After all, the only one he’d actually pokerized was the wife of the guy in the white Connie, and maybe he could just roll that off on ole Poke. Poke wouldn’t mind. Poke was just as dead as old Dad’s hatband. Lloyd’s smile broadened a little. You had to look on the sunny side. That was the ticket. Life was too short to do anything else.

He became aware that the guard had left them alone and that his lawyer—his name was Andy Devins, Lloyd remembered—was looking at him in a strange way. It was the way you might look at a rattlesnake whose back has been broken but whose deadly bite is probably still unimpaired.

“You’re in deep shit, Sylvester!” Devins exclaimed suddenly.

Lloyd jumped. “What? What the hell do you mean, I’m in deep shit? By the way, I thought you handled ole fatty there real good. He looked mad enough to chew nails and spit out—”

“Listen to me, Sylvester, and listen very carefully.”

“My name’s not—”

“You don’t have the slightest idea how big a jam you’re in, Sylvester.” Devins’s gaze never faltered. His voice was soft and intense. His hair was blond and crewcut, hardly more than a fuzz. His scalp shone through pinkly. There was a plain gold wedding band on the third finger of his left hand and a fancy fraternity ring on the third finger of his right. He knocked them together and they made a funny little click that set Lloyd’s teeth on edge. “You’re going to trial in just nine days, Sylvester, because of a decision the Supreme Court handed down four years ago.”

“What was that?” Lloyd was more uneasy than ever.

“It was the case of Markham vs. South Carolina,” Devins said, “and it had to do with the conditions under which individual states may best administer swift justice in cases where the death penalty is requested.”

“Death penalty!” Lloyd cried, horror-struck. “You mean the lectric chair? Hey, man, I never killed anybody! Swear to God!”

“In the eyes of the law, that doesn’t matter,” Devins said. “If you were there, you did it.”

“What do you mean, it don’t matter?” Lloyd nearly screamed. “It does so matter! It better fuckin matter! I didn’t waste those people, Poke did! He was crazy! He was—”

“Will you shut up, Sylvester?” Devins inquired in that soft, intense voice, and Lloyd shut. In his sudden fear he had forgotten the cheers for him in Maximum, and even the unsettling possibility that he might lose a tooth. He suddenly had a vision of Tweety Bird running a number on Sylvester the Cat. Only in his mind, Tweety wasn’t bopping that dumb ole puddy-tat over the head with a mallet or sticking a mousetrap in front of his questing paw; what Lloyd saw was Sylvester strapped into Old Sparky while the parakeet perched on a stool by a big switch. He could even see the guard’s cap on Tweety’s little yellow head.

This was not a particularly amusing picture.

Perhaps Devins saw some of this in his face, because he looked moderately pleased for the first time. He folded his hands on the pile of papers he had taken from his briefcase. “There is no such thing as an accessory when it comes to first-degree murder committed during a felony crime,” he said. “The state has three witnesses who will testify that you and Andrew Freeman were together. That pretty well fries your skinny butt. Do you understand?”

“I—”

“Good. Now to get back to Markham vs. South Carolina. I am going to tell you, in words of one syllable, how the ruling in that case bears on your situation. But first, I ought to remind you of a fact you doubtless learned during one of your trips through the ninth grade: the Constitution of the United States specifically forbids cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Like the fucking lectric chair, damn right,” Lloyd said righteously.

Devins was shaking his head. “That’s where the law was unclear,” he said, “and up until four years ago, the courts had gone round and round and up and down, trying to make sense of it. Does ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ mean things like the electric chair and the gas chamber? Or does it mean the wait between sentencing and execution? The appeals, the delays, the stays, the months and years that certain prisoners—Edgar Smith, Caryl Chessman, and Ted Bundy are probably the most famous—were forced to spend on various Death Rows? The Supreme Court allowed executions to recommence in the late seventies, but Death Rows were still clogged, and that nagging question of cruel and unusual punishment remained. Okay—in Markham vs. South Carolina, you had a man sentenced to the electric chair for the rape-murder of three college co-eds. Premeditation was proved by a diary this fellow, Jon Markham, had kept. The jury sentenced him to death.”

“Bad shit,” Lloyd whispered.

Devins nodded, and gave Lloyd a slightly sour smile. “The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which reconfirmed that capital punishment was not cruel and unusual under certain circumstances. The court suggested that sooner was better… from a legal standpoint. Are you beginning to get it, Sylvester? Are you beginning to see?”

Lloyd didn’t.

“Do you know why you’re being tried in Arizona rather than New Mexico or Nevada?”

Lloyd shook his head.

“Because Arizona is one of four states that has a Capital Crimes Circuit Court which sits only in cases where the death penalty has been asked for and obtained.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You’re going to trial in four days,” Devins said. “The state has such a strong case that they can afford to empanel the first twelve men and women that get called to the box. I’ll drag it out as long as I can, but we’ll have a jury on the first day. The state will present its case on the second day. I’ll try to take up three days, and I’ll filibuster on my opening and closing statements until the judge cuts me off, but three days is really tops. We’ll be lucky to get that. The jury will retire and find you guilty in about three minutes unless a goddamned miracle happens. Nine days from today you’ll be sentenced to death, and a week later, you’ll be dead as dogmeat. The people of Arizona will love it, and so will the Supreme Court. Because quicker makes everybody happier. I can stretch the week—maybe—but only a little.”

“Jesus Christ, but that’s not fair!” Lloyd cried.

“It’s a tough old world, Lloyd,” Devins said. “Especially for ‘mad dog killers,’ which is what the newspapers and TV commentators are calling you. You’re a real big man in the world of crime. You’ve got real drag. You even put the flu epidemic back East on page two.”

“I never pokerized nobody,” Lloyd said sulkily. “Poke, he did it all. He even made up that word.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Devins said. “That’s what I’m trying to pound through your thick skull, Sylvester. The judge is going to leave the Governor room for one stay, and only one. I’ll appeal, and under the new guidelines, my appeal has to be in the hands of the Capital Crimes Circuit Court within seven days or you exit stage left immediately. If they decide not to hear the appeal, I have another seven days to petition the Supreme Court of the United States. In your case, I’ll file my appeal brief as late as possible. The Capital Crimes Circuit Court will probably agree to hear us—the system’s still new, and they want as little criticism as possible. They’d probably hear Jack the Ripper’s appeal.”

“How long before they get to me?” Lloyd muttered.

“Oh, they’ll handle it in jig time,” Devins answered, and his smile became slightly wolfish. “You see, the Circuit Court is made up of five retired Arizona judges. They’ve got nothing to do but go fishing, play poker, drink bonded bourbon, and wait for some sad sack of shit like you to show up in their courtroom, which is really a bunch of computer modems hooked up to the State House, the Governor’s office, and each other. They’ve got telephones equipped with modems in their cars, cabins, even their boats, as well as in their houses. Their average age is seventy-two—”

Lloyd winced.

“—which means some of them are old enough to have actually ridden the Circuit Line out there in the willywags, if not as judges then as lawyers or law students. They all believe in the Code of the West—a quick trial and then up the rope. It was the way out here until 1950 or so. When it came to multiple murderers, it was the only way.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty, do you have to go on about it like that?”

“You need to know what we’re up against,” Devin said. “They just want to make sure you don’t suffer cruel and unusual punishment, Lloyd. You ought to thank them.”

“Thank them? I’d like to—”

“Pokerize them?” Devins asked quietly.

“No, course not,” Lloyd said unconvincingly.

“Our petition for a new trial will be turned down and all my exceptions will be quickly heaved out. If we’re lucky, the court will invite me to present witnesses. If they give me the opportunity, I’ll recall everybody that testified at the original trial, plus anyone else I can think of. At that point I’d call your junior high school chums as character witnesses, if I could find them.”

“I quit school in the sixth grade,” Lloyd said bleakly.

“After the Circuit Court turns us down, I’ll petition to be heard by the Supreme Court. I expect to be turned down on the same day.”

Devins stopped and lit a cigarette.

“Then what?” Lloyd asked.

“Then?” Devins asked, looking mildly surprised and exasperated at Lloyd’s continuing stupidity. “Why, then you go on to Death Row at state prison and just enjoy all that good food until it’s time to ride the lightning. It won’t be long.”

“They wouldn’t really do it,” Lloyd said. “You’re just trying to scare me.”

“Lloyd, the four states that have the Capital Crimes Circuit Court do it all the time. So far, forty men and women have been executed under the Markham guidelines. It costs the taxpayers a little extra for the added court, but not all that much, since they only work on a tiny percentage of first-degree murder cases. Also, the taxpayers really don’t mind opening their pocketbooks for capital punishment. They like it.”

Lloyd looked ready to throw up.

“Anyway,” Devins said, “a DA will only try a defendant under Markham guidelines if he looks completely guilty. It isn’t enough for the dog to have chicken feathers on his muzzle; you’ve got to catch him in the henhouse. Which is where they caught you.”

Lloyd, who had been basking in the cheers from the boys in Maximum Security not fifteen minutes ago, now found himself staring down a paltry two or three weeks and into a black hole.

“You scared, Sylvester?” Devins asked in an almost kindly way.

Lloyd had to lick his lips before he could answer. “Christ yes, I’m scared. From what you say, I’m a dead man.”

“I don’t want you dead,” Devins said, “just scared. If you go into that courtroom smirking and swaggering, they’ll strap you in the chair and throw the switch. You’ll be number forty-one under Markham. But if you listen to me, we might be able to squeak through. I don’t say we will; I say we might.”

“Go ahead.”

“The thing we have to count on is the jury,” Devins said. “Twelve ordinary shleps off the street. I’d like a jury filled with forty-two-year-old ladies who can still recite Winnie the Pooh by heart and have funerals for their pet birds in the back yard, that’s what I’d like. Every jury is made very aware of Markham ’s consequences when they’re empaneled. They’re not bringing in a verdict of death that may or may not be implemented in six months or six years, long after they’ve forgotten it; the guy they’re condemning in June is going to be pushing up daisies before the All-Star break.”

“You’ve got a hell of a way of putting things.”

Ignoring him, Devins went on: “In some cases, just that knowledge has caused juries to bring in verdicts of not guilty. It’s one adverse result of Markham. In some cases, juries have let blatant murderers go just because they didn’t want blood that fresh on their hands.” He picked up a sheet of paper. “Although forty people have been executed under Markham, the death penalty has been asked for under Markham a total of seventy times. Of the thirty not executed, twenty-six were found ‘not guilty’ by the empaneled juries. Only four convictions were overturned by the Capital Crimes Circuit Courts, one in South Carolina, two in Florida, and one in Alabama.”

“Never in Arizona?”

“Never. I told you. The Code of the West. Those five old men want your ass nailed to a board. If we don’t get you off in front of a jury, you’re through. I can offer you ninety-to-one on it.”

“How many people have been found not guilty by regular court juries under that law in Arizona?”

“Two out of fourteen.”

“Those are pretty crappy odds, too.”

Devins smiled his wolfish smile. “I should point out,” he said, “that one of those two was defended by yours truly. He was guilty as sin, Lloyd, just like you are. Judge Pechert raved at those ten women and two men for twenty minutes. I thought he was going to have apoplexy.”

“If I was found not guilty, they couldn’t try me again, could they?”

“Absolutely not.”

“So it’s one roll, double or nothing.”

“Yes.”

“Boy,” Lloyd said, and wiped his forehead.

“As long as you understand the situation,” Devins said, “and where we have to make our stand, we can get down to brass tacks.”

“I understand it. I don’t like it, though.”

“You’d be nuts if you did.” Devins folded his hands and leaned over them. “Now. You’ve told me and you’ve told the police that you, uh…” He took a stapled sheaf of papers out of the stack by his briefcase and riffled through them. “Ah. Here we are. ‘I never killed nobody. Poke did all the killing. Killing was his idea, not mine. Poke was crazy as a bedbug and I guess it is a blessing to the world that he has passed on.’”

“Yeah, that’s right, so what?” Lloyd said defensively.

“Just this,” Devins said cozily. “That implies you were scared of Poke Freeman. Were you scared of him?”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly—”

“You were afraid for your life, in fact.”

“I don’t think it was—”

“Terrified. Believe it, Sylvester. You were shitting nickels.”

Lloyd frowned at his lawyer. It was the frown of a lad who wants to be a good student but is having a serious problem grasping the lesson.

“Don’t let me lead you, Lloyd,” Devins said. “I don’t want to do that. You might think I was suggesting that Poke was stoned almost all the time—”

“He was! We both was!”

“No. You weren’t, but he was. And he got crazy when he got stoned—”

“Boy, you’re not shitting.” In the halls of Lloyd’s memory, the ghost of Poke Freeman cried Whoop! Whoop! merrily and shot the woman in the Burrack general store.

“And he held a gun on you at several points in time—”

“No, he never—”

“Yes he did. You just forgot for a while. In fact, he once threatened to kill you if you didn’t back his play.”

“Well, I had a gun—”

“I believe,” Devins said, eyeing him closely, “that if you search your memory, you’ll remember Poke telling you that your gun was loaded with blanks. Do you remember that?”

“Now that you mention it—”

“And nobody was more surprised than you when it actually started firing real bullets, right?”

“Sure,” Lloyd said. He nodded vigorously. “I bout damn near had a hemorrhage.”

“And you were about to turn that gun on Poke Freeman when he was cut down, saving you the trouble.”

Lloyd regarded his lawyer with dawning hope in his eyes.

“Mr. Devins,” he said with great sincerity, “that’s just the way the shit went down.”

He was in the exercise yard later that morning, watching a softball game and mulling over everything Devins had told him, when a large inmate named Mathers came over and yanked him up by the collar. Mathers’s head was shaved bald, à la Telly Savalas, and it gleamed benignly in the hot desert air.

“Now wait a minute,” Lloyd said. “My lawyer counted every one of my teeth. Seventeen. So if you—”

“Yeah, that’s what Shockley said,” Mathers said. “So, he told me to—”

Mathers’s knee came up squarely in Lloyd’s crotch, and blinding pain exploded there, so excruciating that he could not even scream. He collapsed in a hunching, writhing pile, clutching his testicles, which felt crushed. The world was a reddish fog of agony.

After a while, who knew how long, he was able to look up. Mathers was still looking at him, and his bald head was still gleaming. The guards were pointedly looking elsewhere. Lloyd moaned and writhed, tears squirting out of his eyes, a red-hot ball of lead in his belly.

“Nothing personal,” Mathers said sincerely. “Just business, you understand. Myself, I hope you make out. That Markham law’s a bitch.”

He strode away and Lloyd saw the door-guard standing atop the ramp in the truck-loading bay on the other side of the exercise yard. His thumbs were hooked in his Sam Browne belt and he was grinning at Lloyd. When he saw he had Lloyd’s complete, undivided attention, the door-guard shot him the bird with the middle fingers of both hands. Mathers strolled over to the wall, and the door-guard threw him a pack of Tareytons. Mathers put them in his breast pocket, sketched a salute, and walked away. Lloyd lay on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest, hands clutching his cramping belly, and Devins’s words echoed in his brain: It’s a tough old world, Lloyd, it’s a tough old world.

Right.

Chapter 25

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 dosed 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 her semi-nakedness 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!”

He poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the nightstand and held it to her lips but she thrashed again and almost knocked it from his grasp. He set it back down where it would be in reach if she quieted.

He had never been so bitterly aware of his muteness as the last two days had made him. The Methodist minister, Braceman, had been with her on the twenty-third when Nick came over. He was Bible-reading with her in the living room, but he looked nervous and anxious to get away. Nick could guess why. Her fever had given her a rosy, girlish glow that went jarringly with her bereavement. Perhaps the minister had been afraid she was going to make a pass at him. More likely, though, he had been anxious to gather up his family and melt away over the fields. News travels fast in a small town, and others had already decided to get out of Shoyo.

Since the time Braceman had left the Baker living room some forty-eight hours ago, everything had turned into a waking nightmare. Mrs. Baker had gotten worse, so much worse that Nick had feared she would die before the sun went down.

Worse, he couldn’t sit with her constantly. He had gone down to the truck-stop to get his three prisoners lunch, but Vince Hogan hadn’t been able to eat. He was delirious. Mike Childress and Billy Warner wanted out, but Nick couldn’t bring himself to do it. It wasn’t fear; he didn’t believe they would waste any time working him over to settle their grievance; they would want to make fast tracks away from Shoyo, like the others. But he had a responsibility. He had made a promise to a man who was now dead. Surely, sooner or later the State Patrol would get things in hand and come to take them away.

He found a .45 rolled up in its holster in the bottom drawer of Baker’s desk, and after a few moments of debate he put it on. Looking down and seeing the woodgrip butt of the gun lying against his skinny hip had made him feel ridiculous—but its weight was comforting.

He had opened Vince’s cell on the afternoon of the twenty-third and had put makeshift icepacks on the man’s forehead, chest, and neck. Vince had opened his eyes and looked at Nick with such silent, miserable appeal that Nick wished he could say anything—as he wished it now, two days later, with Mrs. Baker—anything that would give the man a moment’s comfort. Just You’ll be okay or I think the fever’s breaking would be enough.

All the time he was tending to Vince, Billy and Mike were yelling at him. While he was bent over the sick man they didn’t matter, but he saw their scared faces every time he looked up, their lips forming words that all came down to the same thing: Please let us out. Nick was careful to keep away from them. He wasn’t grown, but he, was old enough to know that panic makes men dangerous.

That afternoon he had shuttled back and forth on nearly empty streets, always expecting to find Vince Hogan dead on one end or Jane Baker dead on the other. He looked for Dr. Soames’s car but didn’t see it. That afternoon a few of the shops had still been open, and the Texaco, but he became more and more convinced that the town was emptying out. People were taking paths through the woods, logging roads, maybe even wading up Shoyo Stream, which passed through Smackover and eventually came out in the town of Mount Holly. More would leave after dark, Nick thought.

The sun had just gone down when he arrived at the Baker house to find Jane moving shakily around the kitchen in her bathrobe, brewing tea. She looked at Nick gratefully when he came in, and he saw her fever was gone.

“I want to thank you for watching after me,” she said calmly. “I feel ever so much better. Would you like a cup of tea?” And then she burst into tears.

He went to her, afraid she might faint and fall against the hot stove.

She held his arm to steady herself and laid her head against him, her hair a dark flood against the light blue robe.

“Johnny,” she said in the darkening kitchen. “Oh, my poor Johnny.”

If he could speak, Nick thought unhappily. But he could only hold her, and guide her across the kitchen to a chair by the table.

“The tea—”

He pointed to himself and then made her sit down.

“All right,” she said. “I do feel better. Remarkably so. It’s just that… just…” She put her hands over her face.

Nick made them hot tea and brought it to the table. They drank for a while without speaking. She held her cup in both hands, like a child. At last she put her cup down and said: “How many in town have this, Nick?”

“I don’t know anymore,” Nick wrote. “It’s pretty bad.”

“Have you seen the doctor?”

“Not since this morning.”

“Am will wear himself out if he’s not careful,” she said. “He’ll be careful, won’t he, Nick? Not to wear himself out?”

Nick nodded and tried a smile.

“What about John’s prisoners? Has the patrol come for them?”

“No,” Nick wrote. “Hogan is very sick. I’m doing what I can. The others want me to let them out before Hogan can make them sick.”

“Don’t you let them out!” she said with some spirit. “I hope you’re not thinking of it.”

“No,” Nick wrote, and after a moment he added: “You ought to go back to bed. You need rest.”

She smiled at him, and when she moved her head Nick could see the dark smudges under the angles of her jaw—and he wondered uneasily if she was out of the woods yet.

“Yes. I’m going to sleep the clock right around. It seems wrong, somehow, to sleep with John dead… I can hardly believe he is, you know. I keep stumbling over the idea like something I forgot to put away.” He took her hand and squeezed it. She smiled wanly. “There may be something else to live for, in time. Have you gotten your prisoners their supper, Nick?”

Nick shook his head.

“You ought to. Why don’t you take John’s car?”

“I can’t drive,” Nick wrote, “but thank you. I’ll just walk down to the truck-stop. It isn’t far. & check on you—in the morning, if that’s all right.”

“Yes,” she said. “Fine.”

He got up and pointed sternly at the teacup.

“Every drop,” she promised.

He was going out the screen door when he felt her hesitant touch on his arm.

“John—” she said, stopped, and then forced herself to go on. “I hope they… took him to the Curtis Mortuary. That’s where John’s folks and mine have always buried out of. Do you think they took him there all right?”

Nick nodded. The tears brimmed over her cheeks and she began to sob again.

When he left her that night he had gone directly to the truck-stop. A CLOSED sign hung crookedly in the window. He had gone around to the house trailer in back, but it was locked and dark. No one answered his knock. Under the circumstances he felt he was justified in a little breaking and entering; there would be enough in Sheriff Baker’s petty cash box to pay any damages.

He hammered in the glass by the restaurant’s lock and let himself in. The place was spooky even with all the lights on, the jukebox dark and dead, no one at the bumper-pool table or the video games, the booths empty, the stools unoccupied. The hood was over the grille.

Nick went out back and fried some hamburgers on the gas stove and put them in a sack. He added a bottle of milk and half an apple pie that stood under a plastic dome on the counter. Then he went back to the jail, after leaving a note on the counter explaining who had broken in and why.

Vince Hogan was dead. He lay on the floor of his cell amid a clutter of melting ice and wet towels. He had clawed at his neck at the end, as if he had been resisting an invisible strangler. The tips of his fingers were bloody. Flies were lighting on him and buzzing off. His neck was as black and swollen as an inner-tube some heedless child has pumped up to the point of bursting.

“Now will you let us out?” Mike Childress asked. “He’s dead, ya fuckin mutie, are you satisfied? You feel revenged yet? Now he’s got it, too.” He pointed to Billy Warner.

Billy looked terrified. There were hectic red splotches on his neck and cheeks; the arm of his workshirt, with which he had repeatedly swiped at his nose, was stiff with snot. “That’s a lie!” he chanted hysterically. “A lie, a lie, a fuckin lie! that’s a l—” He began to sneeze suddenly, doubling over with the force of them, expelling a heavy spray of saliva and mucus.

“See?” Mike demanded. “Huh? Y’happy, ya fuckin mutie dimwit? Let me out! You can keep him if you want to, but not me. It’s murder, that’s all it is, cold-blooded murder!”

Nick shook his head, and Mike had a tantrum. He began to throw himself against the bars of his cell, bruising his face, bloodying the knuckles of both hands. He stared at Nick with bulging eyes while he banged his forehead repeatedly.

Nick waited until he got tired and then pushed the food through the slots in the bottoms of the cells with the broomhandle. Billy Warner looked at him dully for a moment, then began to eat.

Mike threw his glass of milk against the bars. It shattered and milk sprayed everywhere. He slammed his two burgers against the graffiti-covered rear wall of his cell. One of them stuck in a splat of mustard, ketchup, and relish that was grotesquely cheery, like a Jackson Pollock painting. He jumped up and down on his slice of apple pie, boogying on it. Apple chunks flew every which way. The white plastic plate splintered.

“I’m on a hunger strike!” he yelled. “Fuckin hunger strike! I won’t eat nothing! You’ll eat my dingle before I eat anything you bring me, you fuckin deaf-mute retard asshole! You’ll—”

Nick turned away and silence immediately descended. He went back out into the office, not knowing what to do, scared. If he could drive, he would take them up to Camden himself. But he couldn’t drive. And there was Vince to think about. He couldn’t just let him lie there, drawing flies.

There were two doors opening off the office. One was a coat closet. The other led down a flight of stairs. Nick went down and saw it was a combination cellar and storage room. It was cool down there. It would do, at least for a while.

He went back upstairs. Mike was sitting on the floor, morosely picking up squashed apple slices, brushing them off and eating them. He didn’t look up at Nick.

Nick gathered the body up in his arms and tried to lift it. The sick smell coming off the corpse was making his stomach do cartwheels and handstands. Vince was too heavy for him. He looked at the body helplessly for a moment, and became aware that both of the others were now standing at their cell doors, watching with a dreadful fascination. Nick could guess what they were thinking. Vince had been one of them, a whiny gasbag, maybe, but someone they hung with, just the same. He had died like a rat in a trap with some horrible swelling sickness they didn’t understand. Nick wondered, not for the first time that day, when he would start to sneeze and run a fever and develop those peculiar swellings on his neck.

He laid hold of Vince Hogan’s meaty forearms and dragged him out of the cell. Vince’s head leaned toward him because of the weight on his shoulders, and he seemed to be looking at Nick, wordlessly telling him to be careful, not to joggle him too much.

It took ten minutes to get the big man’s remains down the steep stairs. Panting, Nick laid him on the concrete under the fluorescents, and then covered him quickly with a frayed army blanket from the cot in his cell.

He tried to sleep then, but sleep only came in the early hours of the morning after June twenty-third had become the twenty-fourth, yesterday. His dreams had always been very vivid, and sometimes he was afraid of them. He rarely had out-and-out nightmares, but more and more often lately they were ominous, giving him the feeling that no one in them was exactly as they seemed, and that the normal world had skewed into a place where babies were sacrificed behind closed blinds and stupendous black machines roared on and on in locked basements.

And, of course, there was the very personal terror—that he would wake up with it himself.

He did sleep a little, and the dream that came was one he had had before recently: the cornfield, the smell of warm growing things, the feel that something—or someone—very good and safe was close. A sense of home. And that began to fade into cold terror as he became aware that something was in the corn, watching him. He thought: Ma, weasel’s got in the henhouse! and awoke to early morning light, sweat standing out on his body.

He put coffee on and went in to check on his two prisoners.

Mike Childress was in tears. Behind him, the hamburger was still stuck on the wall in its drying glue of condiments.

“You satisfied now? I got it too. Ain’t that what you wanted? Ain’t that your revenge? Listen to me, I sound like a fuckin freight train goin up a hill!”

But Nick’s first concern had been for Billy Warner, who lay comatose on his bunk. His neck was swelled and black, his chest rising in fits and starts.

He hurried back to the office, looked at the telephone, and in a fit of rage and guilt he knocked it off the desk and onto the floor, where it lay meaninglessly at the end of its cord. He turned the hotplate off and ran down the street to the Baker house. He pushed the bell for what seemed an hour before Jane came down, wrapped in her robe. The fever-sweat was back on her face. She was not delirious, but her words were slow and slurry and her lips were blistered.

“Nick. Come in. What is it?”

“V. Hogan died last night. Warner’s dying, I think. He’s awful sick. Have you seen Dr. Soames?”

She shook her head, shivered in the light draft, sneezed, and then swayed on her feet. Nick put an arm around her shoulders and led her to a chair. He wrote: “Can you call his office for me?”

“Yes, of course. Bring me the phone, Nick. I seem… to have had a setback in the night.”

He brought the phone over and she dialed Soames’s number. After she had held the receiver to her ear for more than half a minute, he knew there was going to be no answer.

She tried his home, then the home of his nurse. No answer.

“I’ll try the State Patrol,” she said, but put the phone back in the cradle after dialing a single number. “The long-distance is still out of service, I guess. After I dial 1, it just goes wah-wah-wah in my ear.” She gave him a pallid smile and then the tears began to flow helplessly. “Poor Nick,” she said. “Poor me. Poor everybody. Could you help me upstairs? I feel so weak, and I can’t catch my breath. I think I’ll be with John soon.” He looked at her, wishing he could speak. “I think I’ll lie down, if you can help me.”

He helped her upstairs, then wrote: “I’ll be back.”

“Thank you, Nick. You’re a good boy…” She was already drifting off to sleep.

Nick left the house and stood on the sidewalk, wondering what to do next. If he could drive, he might be able to do something. But…

He saw a child’s bicycle lying on the lawn of a house across the street. He went to it, looked at the house it belonged to with its drawn shades (so much like the houses in his confused dreams), then went and knocked on the door. There was no answer, although he knocked several times.

He went back to the bike. It was small, but not too small for him to ride, if he didn’t mind his knees whamming the handlebars. He would look ludicrous, of course, but he was not at all sure there was anyone left in Shoyo to see… and if there was, he didn’t think many of them would be in a laughing frame of mind.

He got on the bike and pedaled clumsily up Main Street, past the jail, then east on Route 63, toward where Joe Rackman had seen the soldiers masquerading as a road crew. If they were still there, and if they really were soldiers, Nick would get them to take care of Billy Warner and Mike Childress. If Billy was still alive, that was. If those men had quarantined Shoyo, then surely the sick of Shoyo were their responsibility.

It took him an hour to pedal out to the roadwork, the bike weaving crazily back and forth across the center line, his knees thumping the handlebars with monotonous regularity. But when he got there the soldiers, or road crew, or whatever they had been, were gone. There were a few smudgepots, one of them still flickering. There were two orange sawhorses. And the road had been torn up, although Nick judged it would still be passable, if you weren’t too choosy about the springs of your car.

Black flickering movement caught the tail of his eye, and at the same instant the wind stirred around a little, just a soft summer breath, but enough to bring a ripe and sickening odor of corruption to his nostrils. The black movement was a cloud of flies, constantly forming and re-forming itself. He walked the bike over to the ditch at the far side of the road. In it, next to a shiny new corrugated culvert pipe, were the bodies of four men. Their necks and swollen faces were black. Nick didn’t know if they were soldiers or not, and he didn’t go any closer. He told himself he would walk back to the bike, there was nothing here to be scared about, they were dead, and dead people couldn’t hurt you. He was running by the time he was twenty feet from the ditch, anyway, and he was in a panic as he rode back toward Shoyo. On the outskirts of town he hit a rock and crashed the bike. He went over the handlebars, bumped his head, and scraped his hands. He only hunkered there for a moment in the middle of the road, shivering all over.

For the next hour and a half of that morning, yesterday morning, Nick knocked on doors and rang bells. There would be someone well, he told himself. He himself felt all right, and surely he could not be the only one. There would be someone, a man, a woman, maybe a teenager with a learner’s permit, and he or she would say: Oh, hey, yes. Let’s get them to Camden. We’ll take the station wagon. Or words to that effect.

But his knocking and ringing were answered less than a dozen times. The door would open to the length of a latch-chain, a sick but hopeful face would look out, see Nick, and hope would die. The face would move back and forth in negation, and then the door would shut. If Nick could talk, he would have argued if they could still walk, they could drive. That if they took his prisoners to Camden, they could go themselves, and there would be a hospital. They would be made well. But he couldn’t speak.

Some asked if he had seen Dr. Soames. One man, in a delirious rage, threw the door of his small ranch-house wide open, staggered out on the porch dressed only in Isis underpants, and tried to grab Nick. He said he was going to do “what I should have done to you back in Houston.” He seemed to think Nick was someone named Jenner. He lurched back and forth along the porch after Nick like a zombie in a third-rate horror picture. His crotch had swelled terribly; his underpants looked as if someone had stuffed a honeydew melon into them. At last he crashed to the porch and Nick watched him from the lawn below, his heart thumping rapidly. The man shook his fist weakly, then crawled back inside, not bothering to shut the door.

But most of the houses were only silent and cryptic, and at last he could do no more. That dream-sense of ominousness was creeping up on him and it became impossible to dismiss the idea that he was knocking on the doors of tombs, knocking to wake the dead, and that sooner or later the corpses might begin to answer. It didn’t help much to tell himself that most of the houses were empty, their occupants already fled to Camden or El Dorado or Texarkana.

He went back to the Baker house. Jane Baker was sleeping deeply, her forehead cool. But this time he wasn’t as hopeful.

It was noon. Nick went back to the truck-stop, feeling his night’s broken rest now. His body seemed to throb all over from his spill off the bike. Baker’s .45 banged his hip. At the truck-stop he heated two cans of soup and put them in thermos jugs. The milk in the fridge still seemed fine, so he took a bottle of that, too.

Billy Warner was dead, and when Mike saw Nick, he began to giggle hysterically and point his finger. “Two down and one to go! Two down and one to go! You’re gettin your revenge! Right? Right?”

Nick carefully pushed the thermos of soup through the slot with the broomhandle, and then a big glass of milk. Mike began to drink soup directly from the thermos in small sips. Nick took his own thermos and sat down in the hallway. He would take Billy downstairs, but first he would have lunch. He was hungry. As he drank his soup he looked at Mike thoughtfully.

“You wondering how I am?” Mike asked.

Nick nodded.

“Just the same as when you left this morning. I must have hawked out a pound of snot.” He looked at Nick hopefully. “My mom always said that when you hawked snot like that, you was gettin better. Maybe I just got a mild case, huh? You think that might be?”

Nick shrugged. Anything was possible.

“I got the constitution of a brass eagle,” Mike said. “I think it’s nothing. I think I’ll throw it off. Listen, man, let me out. Please. I’m fuckin beggin you now.”

Nick thought about it.

“Hell, you got the gun. I don’t want you for nothing, anyway. I just want to get out of this town. I want to check on my wife first—”

Nick pointed to Mike’s left hand, which was bare of rings.

“Yeah, we’re divorced, but she’s still here in town, out on the Ridge Road. I’d like to look in on her. What do you say, man?” Mike was crying. “Give me a chance. Don’t keep me locked up in this rat-trap.”

Nick stood up slowly, went out into the office, and opened the desk drawer. The keys were there. The man’s logic was inexorable; there was no sense in believing that someone was going to come and bail them out of this terrible mess. He got the keys and went back. He held up the one Big John Baker had shown him, with the tag of white tape on it, and tossed them through the bars to Mike Childress.

“Thanks,” Mike babbled. “Oh, thanks. I’m sorry we beat up on you, I swear to God, it was Ray’s idea, me and Vince tried to stop him but he gets drinkin and he gets crazy—” He rattled the key in the lock. Nick stood back, his hand on the gunbutt.

The cell door opened and Mike stepped out. “I meant it,” he said. “All I want to do is get out of this town.” He sidled past Nick, a grin twitching at his lips. Then he bolted through the door between the small cellblock and the office. Nick followed just in time to see the office door closing behind him.

Nick went outside. Mike was standing on the curb, his hand on a parking meter, looking at the empty street.

“My God,” he whispered, and turned his stunned face to look at Nick. “All this? All this?”

Nick nodded, his hand still on the gunbutt.

Mike started to say something, and it turned into a coughing spasm. He covered his mouth, then wiped his lips.

“I’m getting to Christ out of here,” he said. “You’re wise, you’ll do the same thing, mutie. This is like the black death, or somethin.”

Nick shrugged, and Mike started down the sidewalk. He moved faster and faster until he was nearly running. Nick watched him until he was out of sight, and then went back inside. He never saw Mike again. His heart felt lighter, and he was suddenly sure that he had done the right thing. He lay down on the cot and went to sleep almost at once.

He slept all afternoon on the blanketless couch and awoke sweaty but feeling a little better. Thunderstorms were beating the hills—he couldn’t hear the thunder, but he could see the blue-white forks of light stabbing the hills—but none had come to Shoyo that night.

At dusk he walked down Main Street to Paulie’s Radio & TV and committed another of his apologetic break-ins. He left a note by the cash register and lugged a Sony portable back to the jail. He turned it on and flipped through the channels. The CBS affiliate was broadcasting a sign which read MICROWAVE RELAY DIFFICULTY PLEASE STAY TUNED. The ABC station was showing “I Love Lucy,” and the NBC feed was a rerun episode in a current series about a perky young girl trying to be a mechanic on the stock-car circuit. The Texarkana station, an independent specializing mostly in old movies, game shows, and religious zanies of the Jack Van Impe stripe, was off the air.

Nick snapped the TV off, went down to the truck-stop, and fixed enough soup and sandwiches for two. He thought there was something eerie about the way all the streetlights still came on, stretching out both ways along Main Street in spotlit pools of white light. He put the food in a hamper, and on the way to Jane Baker’s house three or four dogs, obviously unfed and ravenous, advanced on him in a pack, drawn by the smell from the hamper. Nick drew the .45 but couldn’t summon up the heart to use it until one of the dogs was getting ready to bite him. Then he pulled the trigger and the bullet whined off the cement five feet in front of him, leaving a silvery streak of lead. The sound of the report did not come to him, but he felt the dull thud of vibration. The dogs broke and ran.

Jane was asleep, her forehead and cheeks hot, her breathing slow and labored. She looked dreadfully wasted to Nick. He got a cold washcloth and wiped her face. He left her share of food on the night table, and then went down into the living room and turned on the Bakers’ TV, a big console color job.

CBS didn’t come on all night. NBC kept to a regular broadcast schedule, but the picture on the ABC affiliate kept going hazy, sometimes fading out to snow and then snapping back suddenly. The ABC channel showed only old syndication programs, as if its line to the network had been severed. It didn’t matter. What Nick was waiting for was the news.

When it came on, he was dumbfounded. The “superflu epidemic,” as it was now being called, was the lead story, but the newscasters on both stations said it was being brought under control. A flu vaccine had been developed at the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control, and you could get a shot from your, doctor by early the following week. Outbreaks were reportedly serious in New York, San Francisco, L.A., and London, but all were being contained. In some areas, the newscaster went on, public gatherings had been canceled temporarily.

In Shoyo, Nick thought, the entire town had been canceled. Who was kidding who?

The newscaster concluded by saying that travel to most of the large city areas was still restricted, but the restrictions would be lifted as soon as the vaccine was in general release. He then went on to a plane crash in Michigan and some congressional reactions to the latest Supreme Court gay-rights decision.

Nick turned off the TV and went out onto the Bakers’ porch. There was a glider and he sat down in it. The back-and-forth motion was soothing, and he couldn’t hear the rusty squeak that John Baker had kept forgetting to oil. He watched fireflies as they hemmed irregular seams in the dark. Lightning flashed dully inside the clouds on the horizon, making them look as if they held fireflies of their own, monster fireflies the size of dinosaurs. The night was sticky and close.

Because television was a completely visual medium for Nick, he had noticed something about the news broadcast that others might have missed. There had been no film-clips, none at all. There had been no baseball scores, maybe because no ball games had been played. A vague weather report and no weather map showing the highs and lows—it was as if the U.S. Bureau of Meteorology had closed up shop. For all Nick knew to the contrary, they had.

Both newscasters had seemed nervous and upset. One of them had a cold; he had coughed once on mike and had excused himself. Both newscasters had kept cutting their eyes to the left and right of the camera they were facing… as if someone was in the studio with them, someone who was there to make sure they got it right.

That was the night of June 24, and he slept raggedly on the Bakers’ front porch, and his dreams were very bad. And now, on the afternoon of the following day, he was officiating at the death of Jane Baker, this fine woman… and he couldn’t say a word to comfort her.

She was tugging at his hand. Nick looked down at her pale, drawn face. Her skin was dry now, the sweat evaporated. He took no hope or comfort in that, however. She was going. He had come to know the look.

“Nick,” she said, and smiled. She clasped one of his hands in both of hers. “I wanted to thank you again. No one wants to die all alone, do they?”

He shook his head violently, and she understood this was not in agreement with her statement but rather in vehement contradiction of its premise.

“Yes I am,” she contradicted. “But never mind. There’s a dress in that closet, Nick. A white ode. You’ll know it because of…” A fit of coughing interrupted her. When she had it under control, she finished, “… because of the lace. It’s the one I wore on the train when we left for our honeymoon. It still fits… or did. I suppose it will be a little big on me now—I’ve lost some weight—but it doesn’t really matter. I’ve always loved that dress. John and I went to Lake Pontchartrain. It was the happiest two weeks of my life. John always made me happy. Will you remember the dress, Nick? It’s the one I want to be buried in. You wouldn’t be too embarrassed to… to dress me, would you?”

He swallowed hard and shook his head, looking at the coverlet. She must have sensed his mixture of sadness and discomfort, because she didn’t mention the dress again. She talked of other things instead—lightly, almost coquettishly. How she had won an elocution contest in high school, had gone on to the Arkansas state finals, and how her half-slip had fallen down and puddled around her shoes just as she reached the ringing climax of Shirley Jackson’s “The Daemon Lover.” About her sister, who had gone to Viet Nam as part of a Baptist mission group, and had come back with not one or two but three adopted children. About a camping trip she and John had taken three years ago, and how an ill-tempered moose in rut had forced them up a tree and kept them there all day.

“So we sat up there and spooned,” she said sleepily, “like a couple of high school kids in a balcony. My goodness, he was in a state when we got down. He was… we were… in love… very much in love… love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought… it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down… bring them low… and make them crawl… we were… so much in love…”

She drowsed off and slept until he wakened her into fresh delirium by moving a curtain or perhaps just by treading on a squeaky board.

“John! ” she screamed now, her voice choked with phlegm. “Oh, John, I’ll never get the hang of this dad-ratted stick shift! John, you got to help me! You got to help me —”

Her words trailed off in a long, rattling exhalation he could not hear but sensed all the same. A thin trickle of dark blood issued from one nostril. She fell back on the pillow, and her head snapped back and forth once, twice, three times, as if she had made some kind of vital decision and the answer was negative.

Then she was still.

Nick put his hand timidly against the side of her neck, then her inner wrist, then between her breasts. There was nothing. She was dead. The clock on her bedtable ticked importantly, unheard by either of them. He put his head against his knees for a minute, crying a little in the silent way he had. All you can do is have sort of a slow leak, Rudy had told him once, but in a soap opera world, that can come in handy.

He knew what came next and didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t fair, part of him cried out. It wasn’t his responsibility. But since there was no one else here—maybe no one else well for miles around—he would have to shoulder it. Either that or leave her here to rot, and he couldn’t do that. She had been kind to him, and there had been too many people along the way who hadn’t been able to spare that, sick or well. He supposed he would have to get going. The longer he sat here and did nothing, the more he would dread the task. He knew where the Curtis Funeral Home was—three blocks down and one block west. It would be hot out there, too.

He forced himself to get up and go to the closet, half hoping that the white dress, the honeymoon dress, would turn out to have been just another part of her delirium. But it was there. A little yellowed with the years now, but he knew it, all the same. Because of the lace. He took it down and laid it across the bench at the foot of the bed. He looked at the dress, looked at the woman, and thought, It’s going to be more than just a little big on her now. The disease, whatever it is, was crueler to her than she knew… and I guess that’s just as well.

Unwillingly, he went around to her and began to remove the nightgown. But when it was off and she lay naked before him, the dread departed and he felt only pity—a pity lodged so deep in him that it made him ache and he began to cry again as he washed her body and then dressed it as it had been dressed when she wore it on the way to Lake Pontchartrain. And when she was dressed as she had been on that day, he took her in his arms and carried her down to the funeral home in her lace, oh, in her lace: he carried her like a bridegroom crossing an endless threshold with his beloved in his arms.

Chapter 26

Some campus group, probably either Students for a Democratic Society or the Young Maoists, had been busy with a ditto machine during the night of June 25-26. In the morning, these posters were plastered all over the University of Kentucky at Louisville campus:

ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ATTENTION!

YOU ARE BEING LIED TO! THE GOVERNMENT IS LYING TO YOU! THE PRESS, WHICH HAS BEEN CO-OPTED BY THE FORCES OF THE PIG PARAMILITARY, IS LYING TO YOU! THE ADMINISTRATION OF THIS UNIVERSITY IS LYING TO YOU, AS ARE THE INFIRMARY DOCTORS UNDER THE ADMINISTRATION’S ORDERS!

1. THERE IS NO SUPERFLU VACCINE.

2. SUPERFLU IS NOT A SERIOUS DISEASE, IT IS A DEADLY DISEASE.

3. SUSCEPTIBILITY MAY RUN AS HIGH AS 75%.

4. SUPERFLU WAS DEVELOPED BY THE FORCES OF THE U.S. PIG PARAMILITARY AND DISBURSED BY ACCIDENT.

5. THE U.S. PIG PARAMILITARY NOW MEANS TO COVER UP THEIR MURDEROUS BLUNDER EVEN IF IT MEANS 75% OF THE POPULATION WILL DIE!

ALL REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLE, GREETINGS! THE TIME OF OUR STRUGGLE IS NOW! UNITE, STRIVE, CONQUER!

MEETING IN GYM AT 7:00 PM!

STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!

What happened at WBZ-TV in Boston had been planned the night before by three newscasters and six technicians, all operating in Studio 6. Five of these men played poker regularly, and six of the nine were already ill. They felt they had nothing to lose. They collected nearly a dozen handguns. Bob Palmer, who anchored the morning news, brought them upstairs inside a flight bag where he usually carried his notes, pencils, and several legal-sized notepads.

The entire broadcast facility was cordoned off by what they had been told were National Guardsmen, but as Palmer had told George Dickerson the night before, they were the only over-fifty Guardsmen he had ever seen.

At 9:01 A.M., just after Palmer had begun to read the soothing copy he had been handed ten minutes before by an army noncom, a coup took place. The nine of them effectively captured the television station. The soldiers, who hadn’t expected any real trouble from a soft bunch of civilians accustomed to reporting tragedy at long distance, were taken completely by surprise and disarmed. Other station personnel joined the small rebellion, and cleared the sixth floor quickly and locked all the doors. The elevators were brought to six before the soldiers on the lobby level quite knew what was happening. Three soldiers tried to come up the east fire stairs, and a janitor named Charles Yorkin, armed with an army-issue carbine, fired a shot over their heads. It was the only shot fired.

Viewers in the WBZ-TV broadcast area saw Bob Palmer stop his newscast in the middle of a sentence, and heard him say, “Okay, right now!” There were scuffling sounds off-camera. When it was over, thousands of bemused viewers saw that Bob Palmer was now holding a snub-nosed pistol in his hand.

A hoarse, off-mike voice yelled jubilantly: “We got em, Bob! We got the bastards! We got em all!”

“Okay, that’s good work,” Palmer said. He then faced into the camera again. “Fellow citizens of Boston, and Americans in our broadcast area. Something both grave and terribly important has just happened in this studio, and I am very glad it has happened here first, in Boston, the cradle of American independence. For the last seven days, this broadcast facility has been under guard by men purporting to be National Guardsmen. Men in army khaki, armed with guns, have been standing beside our cameramen, in our control rooms, beside our teletypes. Has the news been managed? I am sorry to say that this is the case. I have been given copy and forced to read it, almost literally with gun to my head. The copy I have been reading has to do with the so-called ‘superflu epidemic,’ and all of it is patently false.”

Lights began to flicker on the switchboard. Within fifteen seconds every light was on.

“Our cameramen have taken film that has either been confiscated or deliberately exposed. Our reporters’ stories have disappeared. Yet we do have film, ladies and gentlemen, and we have correspondents right here in the studio-professional reporters, but eyewitnesses to what may be the greatest disaster this country has ever faced… and I do not use those words lightly. We are going to run some of this film for you now. All of it was taken clandestinely, and some of it is of poor quality. Yet we here, who have just liberated our own television station, think you may see enough. More, indeed, than you might have wished.”

He looked up, took a handkerchief from his sport-coat pocket, and blew his nose. Those with good color TVs could see that he looked flushed and feverish.

“If it’s ready, George, go ahead and run it.”

Palmer’s face was replaced with shots of Boston General Hospital. Wards were crammed. Patients lay on the floors. The halls were full; nurses, many of them obviously sick themselves, wove in and out, some of them weeping hysterically. Others looked shocked to the point of coma.

Shots of guards standing on street corners with cradled rifles. Shots of buildings that had been broken into.

Bob Palmer appeared again. “If you have children, ladies and gentlemen,” he said quietly, “we would advise that you ask them to leave the room.”

A grainy shot of a truck backing down a pier jutting out over Boston Harbor, a big olive-colored army truck. Below it, riding uncertainly, was a barge covered with canvas tarps. Two soldiers, rugose and alien in gas masks, jumped down from the truck’s cab. The picture jiggled and joggled, then became steady again as they pulled back the canvas sheet covering the open rear end of the truck. Then they jumped up inside, and bodies began to cascade out onto the barge: women, old men, children, police, nurses; they came in a cartwheeling flood that seemed never to end. At some point during the film-clip it became clear that the soldiers were using pitchforks to get them out.

Palmer went on broadcasting for two hours, his steadily hoarsening voice reading clippings and bulletins, interviewing other members of the crew. It went on until somebody on the ground floor realized that they didn’t have to re-take the sixth floor to stop it. At 11:16, the WBZ transmitter was shut down permanently with twenty pounds of plastique.

Palmer and the others on the sixth floor were summarily executed on charges of treason to their government, the United States of America.

It was a small-town, once-weekly West Virginia newspaper called the Durbin Call-Clarion, put out by a retired lawyer named James D. Hogliss, and its circulation figures had always been good because Hogliss had been a fiery defender of the miners’ right to organize in the late 1940s and in the 1950s, and because his anti-establishment editorials were always filled with hellfire and brimstone missiles aimed at the government hacks at every level, from town to federal.

Hogliss had a regular bunch of paperboys, but on this clear summer morning he took the papers around himself in his 1948 Cadillac, the big whitewall tires whispering up and down the streets of Durbin… and the streets were painfully empty. The papers were piled on the Cadillac’s seats and in its trunk. It was the wrong day for the Call-Clarion to come out, but the paper was only one page of large type set inside a black border. The word at the top proclaimed EXTRA, the first extra edition Hogliss had put out since 1980, when the Ladybird mine had exploded, entombing forty miners for all time.

The headline read: GOV’T FORCES TRY TO CONCEAL PLAGUE OUTBREAK!

Beneath: “Special to the Call-Clarion by James D. Hogliss.”

Below that: It has been revealed to this reporter by a reliable source that the flu epidemic (sometimes called Choking Sickness or Tube Neck here in West Virginia) is in reality a deadly mutation of the ordinary flu virus created by this government, for purposes of war—and in direct disregard of the revised Geneva accords concerning germ and chemical warfare, accords which representatives of the United States signed seven years ago. The source, who is an army official now stationed in Wheeling, also said that promises of a soon-forthcoming vaccine are ‘a baldfaced lie.’ No vaccine, according to this source, has yet been developed.

“Citizens, this is more than a disaster or a tragedy; it is the end of all hope in our government. If we have indeed done such a thing to ourselves, then…”

Hogliss was sick, and very weak. He seemed to have used the last of his strength composing the editorial. It had gone from him into the words and had not been replaced. His chest was full of phlegm, and even normal breathing was like running uphill. Yet he went methodically from house to house, leaving his broadsides, not even knowing if the houses were still occupied, or if they were, if anyone inside had enough strength left to go out and pick up what he had left.

Finally he was on the west end of town, Poverty Row, with its shacks and trailers and its rank septic-tank smell. Only the papers in the trunk remained and he left it open, its lid flopping slowly up and down as he went over the washboards in the road. He was trying to cope with a fearsome headache, and his vision kept doubling on him.

When the last house, a tumbledown shack near the Rack’s Crossing town line, was taken care of, he still had a bundle of perhaps twenty-five papers. He slit the string which bound them with his old pocketknife and then let the wind take them where the wind would, thinking of his source, a major with dark, haunted eyes who had been transferred from something top secret in California called Project Blue only three months before. The major had been charged with outside security there, and he kept fingering the pistol on his hip as he told Hogliss everything he knew. Hogliss thought it would not be long before the major used the gun, if he hadn’t used it already.

He climbed back behind the wheel of the Cadillac, the only car he had owned since his twenty-seventh birthday, and discovered he was too tired to drive back to town. So he leaned back sleepily, listened to the drowning sounds coming from his chest, and watched the wind blow his extra editions lazily up the road toward Rack’s Crossing. Some of them had caught in the overhanging trees, where they hung like strange fruit. Nearby, he could hear the bubbling, racing sound of Durbin Stream, where he had fished as a boy. There were no fish in it now, of course—the coal companies had seen to that—but the sound was still soothing. He closed his eyes, slept, and died an hour and a half later.

The Los Angeles Times ran only 26,000 copies of their one-page extra before the officers in charge discovered that they were not printing an advertising circular, as they had been told. The reprisal was swift and bloody. The official FBI story was that “radical revolutionaries,” that old bugaboo, had dynamited the L.A. Times ’ presses, causing the death of twenty-eight workers. The FBI didn’t have to explain how the explosion had put bullets in each of the twenty-eight heads, because the bodies were mingled with those of thousands of others, epidemic victims who were being buried at sea.

Yet 10,000 copies got out, and that was enough. The headline, in 36-point-type, screamed:

WEST COAST IN GRIP OF PLAGUE EPIDEMIC

Thousands Flee Deadly Superflu

Government Coverup Certain

LOS ANGELES—Some of the soldiers purporting to be National Guardsmen helping out during the current ongoing tragedy are career soldiers with as many as four ten-year pips on their sleeves. Part of their job is to assure terrified Los Angeles residents that the superflu, known as Captain Trips by the young in most areas, is “only slightly more virulent” than the London or Hong Kong strains… but these assurances are made through portable respirators. The President is scheduled to speak tonight at 6:00 PST and his press secretary, Hubert Ross, has branded reports that the President will speak from a set mocked up to look like the Oval Office but actually deep in the White House bunker “hysterical, vicious, and totally unfounded.” Advance copies of the President’s speech indicate that he will “spank” the American people for overreacting, and compare the current panic to that which followed Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in the early 30s.

The Times has five questions it wishes the President would answer in his speech.

1. Why has the Times been enjoined from printing the news by thugs in army uniforms, in direct violation of its Constitutional right to do so?

2. Why have the following highways—US 5, US 10, and US 15—been blocked off by armored cars and troop carriers?

3. If this is a “minor outbreak of flu,” why has martial law been declared for Los Angeles and surrounding areas?

4. If this is a “minor outbreak of flu,” then why are barge-trains being towed out into the Pacific and dumped? And do these barges contain what we are afraid they contain and what informed sources have assured us they do contain—the dead bodies of plague victims?

5. Finally, if a vaccine really is to be distributed to doctors and area hospitals early next week, why has not one of the forty-six physicians that this newspaper contacted for further details heard of any delivery plans? Why has not one clinic been set up to administer flu shots? Why has not one of the ten pharmaceutical houses we called gotten freight invoices or government fliers on this vaccine?

We call upon the President to answer these questions in his speech, and above all we call upon him to end these police-state tactics and this insane effort to cover up the truth…

In Duluth a man in khaki shorts and sandals walked up and down Piedmont Avenue with a large smear of ash on his forehead and a hand-lettered sandwich board hanging over his scrawny shoulders.

The front read:

THE TIME OF THE DISAPPEARANCE IS HERE

CHRIST THE LORD RETURNETH SOON

PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD!

The back read:

BEHOLD THE HEARTS OF THE SINNERS WERE BROKEN

THE GREAT SHALL BE ABASED AND THE ABASED MADE GREAT

THE EVIL DAYS ARE AT HAND

WOE TO THEE O ZION

Four young men in motorcycle jackets, all of them with bad coughs and runny noses, set upon the man in the khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board. Then they fled, one of them calling back hysterically over his shoulder: “Teach you to scare people! Teach you to scare people, you half-baked freak!”

The highest-rated morning program in Springfield, Missouri, was KLFT’s morning phone-in show, “Speak Your Piece,” with Ray Flowers. He had six phone lines into his studio booth, and on the morning of June 26, he was the only KLFT employee to show up for work. He was aware of what was going on in the outside world and it scared him. In the last week or so, it seemed to Ray that everyone he knew had come down sick. There were no troops in Springfield, but he had heard that the National Guard had been called into K.C. and St. Louis to “stop the spread of panic” and “prevent looting.” Ray Flowers himself felt fine. He looked thoughtfully at his equipment—phones, time-delay device to edit those callers who lapsed into profanity from time to time, racks of commercials on cassettes (“If your toilet overflows/And you don’t know just what goes/Call for the man with the big steel hose/Call your Kleen-Owt Man! ”), and of course, the mike.

He lit a cigarette, went to the studio door, and locked it. Went into his booth and locked that. He turned off the canned music that had been playing from a tape reel, turned on his own theme music, and then settled in at the microphone.

“Hi, y’all,” he said, “this is Ray Flowers on ‘Speak Your Piece,’ and this morning I guess there’s only one thing to call about, isn’t there? You can call it Tube Neck or superflu—or Captain Trips, but it all means the same thing. I’ve heard some horror stories about the army clamping down on everything, and if you want to talk about that, I’m ready to listen. It’s still a free country, right? And since I’m here by myself this morning, we’re going to do things just a little bit differently. I’ve got the time-delay turned off, and I think we can dispense with the commercials. If the Springfield you’re seeing is anything like the one I’m seeing from the KLFT windows, no one feels much like shopping, anyway.

“Okay—if you’re spo’s to be up and around, as my mother used to say, let’s get going. Our toll-free numbers are 555-8600 and 555-8601. If you get a busy, just be patient. Remember, I’m doing it all myself.”

There was an army unit in Carthage, fifty miles from Springfield, and a twenty-man patrol was dispatched to take care of Ray Flowers. Two men refused the order. They were shot on the spot.

In the hour it took them to get to Springfield, Ray Flowers took calls from: a doctor who said people were dying like flies and who thought the government was lying through its teeth about a vaccine; a hospital nurse who confirmed that bodies were being removed from Kansas City hospitals by the truckload; a delirious woman who claimed it was flying saucers from outer space; a farmer who said that an army squad with two payloaders had just finished digging a hell of a long ditch in a field near Route 71 south of Kansas City; half a dozen others with their own stories to tell.

Then there was a crashing sound on the outer studio door. “Open up!” a muffled voice cried. “Open up in the name of the United States!”

Ray looked at his watch. Quarter of twelve.

“Well,” he said, “it looks like the Marines have landed. But we’ll just keep taking calls, shall w—”

There was a rattle of automatic rifle fire, and the knob of the studio door thumped onto the rug. Blue smoke drifted out of the ragged hole. The door was shouldered inward and half a dozen soldiers, wearing respirators and full battledress, burst in.

“Several soldiers have just broken into the outer office,” Ray said. “They’re fully armed… they look like they’re ready to start a mop-up operation in France fifty years ago. Except for the respirators on their faces…”

“Shut it down!” a heavyset man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves yelled. He loomed outside the broadcast booth’s glass walls and gestured with his rifle.

“I think not!” Ray called back. He felt very cold, and when he fumbled his cigarette out of his ashtray, he saw that his fingers were trembling. “This station is licensed by the FCC and I’m—”

“I’m revokin ya fuckin license! Now shut down!”

“I think not,” Ray said again, and turned back to his microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have been ordered to shut down the KLFT transmitter and I have refused the order, quite properly, I think. These men are acting like Nazis, not American soldiers. I am not—”

“Last chance!” The sergeant brought his gun up.

“Sergeant,” one of the soldiers by the door said, “I don’t think you can just—”

“If that man says anything else, waste him,” the sergeant said.

“I think they’re going to shoot me,” Ray Flowers said, and the next moment the glass of his broadcast booth blew inward and he fell over his control panel. From somewhere there came a terrific feedback whine that spiraled up and up. The sergeant fired his entire clip into the control panel and the feedback cut off. The lights on the switchboard continued to blink.

“Okay,” the sergeant said, turning around. “I want to get back to Carthage by one o’clock and I don’t—”

Three of his men opened up on him simultaneously, one of them with a recoilless rifle that fired seventy gas-tipped slugs per second. The sergeant did a jigging, shuffling death-dance and then fell backward through the shattered remains of the broadcast booth’s glass wall. One leg spasmed and his combat boot kicked shards of glass from the frame.

A PFC, pimples standing out in stark relief on his whey-colored face, burst into tears. The others only stood in stunned disbelief. The smell of cordite was heavy and sickening in the air.

“We scragged him!” the PFC cried hysterically. “Holy God, we done scragged Sergeant Peters!”

No one replied. Their faces were still dazed and uncomprehending, although later they would only wish they had done it sooner. All of this was some deadly game, but it wasn’t their game.

The phone, which Ray Flowers had put in the amplifier cradle just before he died, gave out a series of squawks.

“Ray? You there, Ray?” The voice was tired, nasal. “I listen to your program all the time, me and my husband both, and we just wanted to say keep up the good work and don’t let them bully you. Okay, Ray? Ray?… Ray?…”

COMMUNIQUE 234 ZONE 2 SECRET SCRAMBLE

FROM: LANDON ZONE 2 NEW YORK

TO: CREIGHTON COMMANDING

RE: OPERATION CARNIVAL

FOLLOWS: NEW YORK CORDON STILL OPERATIVE DISPOSAL OF BODIES PROCEEDING CITY RELATIVELY QUIET X COVER STORY UNRAVELING FASTER THAN EXPECTED BUT SO FAR NOTHING WE CAN’T HANDLE FROM CITY POPULATION SUPERFLU IS KEEPING MOST OF THEM INSIDE XX NOW ESTIMATE THAT 50% OF TROOPS MANNING BARRICADES AT POINTS OF EGRESS/INGRESS note 1 NOW ILL W/SUPERFLU MOST TROOPS STILL CAPABLE OF ACTIVE DUTY AND PERFORMING WELL XXX THREE FIRES OUT OF CONTROL IN CITY HARLEM 7TH AVENUE SHEA STADIUM XXXX DESERTION FROM RANKS BECOMING A GREATER PROBLEM DESERTERS NOW BEING SUMMARILY SHOT XXXXX PERSONAL SUMMARY IS THAT SITUATION IS STILL VIABLE BUT DETERIORATING SLOWLY XXXXXX COMMUNICATION ENDS

LANDON ZONE 2 NEW YORK

In Boulder, Colorado, a rumor that the U.S. Meteorological Air Testing Center was really a biological warfare installation began to spread. The rumor was repeated on the air by a semidelirious Denver FM disc jockey. By 11 P.M. on the night of June 26, a vast, lemminglike exodus from Boulder had begun. A company of soldiers was sent out from Denver-Arvada to stop them, but it was like sending a man with a whisk-broom to clean out the Augean stables. Better than eleven thousand civilians—sick, scared, and with no other thought but to put as many miles between themselves and the Air Testing Center as possible—rolled over them. Thousands of other Boulderites fled to other points of the compass.

At quarter past eleven a shattering explosion lit the night at the Air Testing Center’s location on Broadway. A young radical named Desmond Ramage had planted better than sixteen pounds of plastique, originally earmarked for various Midwestern courthouses and state legislatures, in the ATC lobby. The explosive was great; the timer was cruddy. Ramage was vaporized along with all sorts of harmless weather equipment and particle-for-particle pollution-measuring gadgets.

Meanwhile, the exodus from Boulder went on.

COMMUNIQUE 771 ZONE 6 SECRET SCRAMBLE

FROM: GARETH ZONE 6 LITTLE ROCK

TO: CREIGHTON COMMANDING

RE: OPERATION CARNIVAL

FOLLOWS: BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED REPEAT BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED HE WAS FOUND WORKING IN A STOREFRONT CLINIC HERE TRIED AND SUMMARILY EXECUTED FOR TREASON AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SOME OF THOSE BEING TREATED ATTEMPTED TO INTERFERE 14 CIVILIANS SHOT, 6 KILLED 3 OF MY MEN WOUNDED, NONE SERIOUSLY X ZONE 6 FORCES THIS AREA WORKING AT ONLY 40% CAPACITY ESTIMATE 25% OF THOSE STILL ON ACTIVE DUTY NOW ILL W/SUPERFLU 15% AWOL XX MOST SERIOUS INCIDENT IN REGARD TO CONTINGENCY PLAN F FOR FRANK XXX SERGEANT T.L. PETERS STATIONED CARTHAGE MO. ON EMERGENCY DUTY SPRINGFIELD MO. APPARENTLY ASSASSINATED BY OWN MEN XXXX OTHER INCIDENTS OF SIMILAR NATURE POSSIBLE BUT UNCONFIRMED SITUATION DETERIORATING RAPIDLY XXXXX COMMUNICATION ENDS

GARFIELD ZONE 6 LITTLE ROCK

When the evening was spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table, two thousand students attending Kent State University in Ohio went on the warpath—big time. The two thousand rioters consisted of first mini-semester summer students, members of a symposium on the future of college journalism, one hundred and twenty attendees of a drama workshop, and two hundred members of the Future Farmers of America, Ohio branch, whose convention happened to coincide with the grassfire spread of the superflu. All of them had been cooped up on the campus since June 22, four days ago. What follows is a transcription of police-band communications in the area, spanning the time period 7:16–7:22 P.M.

“Unit 16, unit 16, do you copy? Over.”

“Ah, copy, unit 20. Over.”

“Ah, we got a group of kids coming down the mall here, 16. About seventy warm bodies, I’d say, and… ah, check that, unit 16, we got another group coming the other way… Jesus, two hundred or more in that one, looks like. Over.”

“Unit 20, this is base. Do you copy? Over.”

“Read you five-by, base. Over.”

“I’m sending Chumm and Halliday over. Block the road with your car. Take no other action. If they go over you, spread your legs and enjoy it. No resistance, do you copy? Over.”

“I copy no resistance, base. What are those soldiers doing over on the eastern side of the mall, base? Over.”

“What soldiers? Over.”

“That’s what I asked you, base. They’re—”

“Base, this is Dudley Chumm. Oh shit, this is unit 12. Sorry, base. There’s a bunch of kids coming down Burrows Drive. About a hundred and fifty. Headed for the mall. Singing or chanting or some damn thing. But Cap, Jesus Christ, we see soldiers, too. They’re wearing gas masks, I think. Ah, they look to be in a skirmish line. That’s what it looks like, anyway. Over.”

“Base to unit 12. Join unit 20 at the foot of the mall. Same instructions. No resistance. Over.”

“Roger, base. I am rolling. Over.”

“Base, this is unit 17. This is Halliday, base. Do you copy? Over.”

“I copy, 17. Over.”

“I’m behind Chumm. There’s another two hundred kids coming west to east toward the mall. They’ve got signs, just like in the sixties. One says SOLDIERS THROW DOWN YOUR GUNS. I see another one that says THE TRUTH THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. They—”

“I don’t give a shit what the signs say, unit 17. Get down there with Chumm and Peters and block them off. It sounds like they’re headed into a tornado. Over.”

“Roger. Over and out.”

“This is Campus Security Chief Richard Burleigh now speaking to the head of the military forces encamped on the south side of this campus. Repeat: this is Campus Security Chief Burleigh. I know you’ve been monitoring our communications, so please spare me the ducking and fucking and acknowledge. Over.”

“This is Colonel Albert Philips, U.S. Army. We are listening, Chief Burleigh. Over.”

“Base, this is unit 16. The kids are coming together at the war memorial. They appear to be turning toward the soldiers. This looks nasty. Over.”

“This is Burleigh, Colonel Philips. Please state your intentions. Over.”

“My orders are to contain those present on campus to the campus. My only intention is to follow my orders. If those people are just demonstrating, they are fine. If they intend to try breaking out of quarantine, they are not. Over.”

“You surely don’t mean—”

“I mean what I said, Chief Burleigh. Over and out.”

“Philips! Philips! Answer me, goddam you! Those aren’t commie guerrillas out there! They’re kids! American kids! They aren’t armed! They—”

“Unit 13 to base. Ah, those kids are walking right toward the soldiers, Cap. They’re waving their signs. Singing that song. The one the Baez crotch used to sing. Oh. Shit, I think some of them are throwing rocks. They… Jesus! Oh Jesus Christ! They can’t do that!”

“Base to unit 13! What’s going on out there? What’s happening?”

“This is Chumm, Dick. I’ll tell you what’s happening out here. It’s a slaughter. I wish I was blind. Oh, the fuckers! They… ah, they’re mowing those kids down. With machine guns, it looks like. As far as I can tell, there wasn’t even any warning. The kids that are still on their feet… ah, they are breaking up… running to all points of the compass. Oh Christ! I just saw a girl cut in half by gunfire! Blood… there must be seventy, eighty kids lying out there on the grass. They—”

“Chumm! Come in! Come in, unit 12!”

“Base, this is unit 17. Do you copy? Over.”

“I copy you, goddammit, but where’s fucking Chumm? Fucking over!”

“Chumm and… Halliday, I think… got out of their cars for a better look. We’re coming back, Dick. Now it looks like the soldiers are shooting each other. I don’t know who’s winning, and I don’t care. Whoever it is will probably start on us next. When those of us who can get back do get back, I suggest that we all go down in the basement and wait for them to use up their ammo. Over.”

“Goddammit—”

“The turkey shoot’s still going on, Dick. I’m not kidding. Over. Out.”

Through most of the running exchange transcribed above, the listener can hear faint popping sounds in the background, not unlike horse chestnuts in a hot fire. One may also hear thin screams… and, in the last forty seconds or so, the heavy, coughing thump of mortar rounds exploding.

Following is a transcription taken from a special high-frequency radio band in Southern California. The transcription was made from 7:17 to 7:20 P.M., PST.

“Massingill, Zone 10. Are you there, Blue Base? This message is coded Annie Oakley, Urgent-plus-10. Come in, if you’re there. Over.”

“This is Len, David. We can skip the jargon, I think. Nobody’s listening.”

“It’s out of control, Len. Everything. L.A. is going up in flames. Whole fucking city and everything around it. All my men are sick or rioting or AWOL or looting right along with the civilian population. I’m in the Skylight Room of the Bank of America, main branch. There’s over six hundred people trying to get in and get at me. Most of them are regular army.”

“Things fall apart. The center does not hold.”

“Say again. I didn’t copy.”

“Never mind. Can you get out?”

“Hell no. But I’ll give the first of the scum something to think about. I’ve got a recoilless rifle here. Scum. Fucking scum!”

“Luck, David.”

“You too. Hold it together as long as you can.”

“Will do.”

“I’m not sure—”

Verbal communication ends at this point. There is a splintering, crashing sound, the screech of giving metal, the tinkle of breaking glass. A great many yelling voices. Small-arms fire, and then, very close to the radio transmitter, close enough to distort, the heavy, thudding explosions of what might very well be a recoilless rifle. The yelling, roaring voices draw closer. There is the whining sound of a ricochet, a scream very close to the transmitter, a thud, and silence.

Following is a transcription taken from the regular army band in San Francisco. The transcription was made from 7:28 to 7:30 P.M., PST.

“Soldiers and brothers! We have taken the radio station, and the command HQ! Your oppressors are dead! I, Brother Zeno, until moments ago Sergeant First Class Roland Gibbs, proclaim myself first President of the Republic of Northern California! We are in control! We are in control! If your officers in the field try to countermand my orders, shoot them like dogs in the street! Like dogs! Like bitches with shit drying on their rumps! Take down name, rank, and serial numbers of deserters! List those that speak sedition or treason against the Republic of Northern California! A new day is dawning! The day of the oppressor is ended! We are—”

A rattle of machine-gun fire. Screams. Thumps and thuds. Pistol shots, more screams, a sustained burst of machine-gun fire. A long, dying moan. Three seconds of dead air.

“This is Major Alfred Nunn, United States Army. I am taking provisional and temporary control of United States forces in the San Francisco area. The handful of traitors present in this HQ have been dealt with. I am in command, repeat, in command. The holding operation will go on. Deserters and defectors will be dealt with as before: extreme prejudice, repeat, extreme prejudice. I am now—”

More gunfire. A scream.

Background: “—them all! Get them all! Death to the war-pigs —”

Heavy gunfire. Then silence on the band.

At 9:16 P.M., EST, those still well enough to watch television in the Portland, Maine, area tuned in WCSH-TV and watched with numbed horror as a huge black man, naked except for a pink leather loincloth and a Marine officer’s cap, obviously ill, performed a series of sixty-two public executions.

His colleagues, also black, also nearly naked, all wore loincloths and some badge of rank to show they had once belonged in the military. They were armed with automatic and semi-automatic weapons. In the area where a studio audience had once watched local political debates and “Dialing for Dollars,” more members of this black “junta” covered perhaps two hundred khaki-clad soldiers with rifles and handguns.

The huge black man, who grinned a lot, showing amazingly even and white teeth in his coal-black face, was holding a .45 automatic pistol and standing beside a large glass drum. In a time that already seemed long ago, that drum had held scraps of cut-up telephone books for the “Dialing for Dollars” program.

Now he spun it, pulled out a driver’s license, and called, “PFC Franklin Stern, front and center, puh-leeze.”

The armed men flanking the audience on all sides bent to look at name tags while a cameraman obviously new to the trade panned the audience in jerky sweeps.

At last a young man with light blond hair, no more than nineteen, was jerked to his feet, screaming and protesting, and led up to the set area. Two of the blacks forced him to his knees.

The black man grinned, sneezed, spat phlegm, and put the .45 automatic to PFC Stern’s temple.

“No!” Stern cried hysterically. “I’ll come in with you, honest to God I will! I’ll—”

“Inthenameofthefathersonandholyghost,” the big black man intoned, grinning, and pulled the trigger. There was a large smear of blood and brains behind the spot where PFC Stern was being forced to kneel; and now he added his own contribution.

Splat.

The black man sneezed again and almost fell over. Another black man, this one in the control room (he was wearing a green long-billed fatigue cap and pristine white jockey shorts), pushed the APPLAUSE button, and in front of the studio audience, the sign flashed on. The blacks guarding the audience/prisoners raised their weapons threateningly, and the captive white soldiers, their faces glistening with perspiration and terror, applauded wildly.

“Next!” the black man in the loincloth proclaimed hoarsely, and delved into the drum again. He looked at the slip and announced: “Master Tech Sergeant Roger Petersen, front n center, puh-leeze! ”

A man in the audience began to howl and made an abortive dive for the back doors. Seconds later he was up on stage. In the confusion, one of the men in the third row tried to remove the name tag pinned to his blouse. One shot banged out and he slumped down in his seat, his eyes glazed as if such a tawdry show had bored him into a deathlike semi-doze.

This spectacle went on until almost quarter of eleven, when four squads of regular army, wearing respirators and carrying submachine guns, crashed into the studio. The two dying groups of soldiers immediately went to war.

The black man in the loincloth went down almost immediately, cursing, sweating, riddled with bullets, and firing his automatic-pistol crazily into the floor. The renegade who had been operating the #2 camera was shot in the belly, and as he leaned forward to catch his spilling guts, his camera pivoted slowly around, giving the audience a leisurely pan shot of hell. The semi-naked guards were returning fire, and the soldiers in the respirators were spraying the entire audience area. The unarmed soldiers in the middle, instead of being rescued, found that their executions had only been speeded up.

A young man with carroty hair and a wild expression of panic on his face climbed over the backs of six rows of seats like a circus performer on stilts before his legs were chewed away by a stream of .45-caliber bullets. Others crawled up the carpeted aisles between rows, their noses to the floor, the way they had been taught to crawl under live machine-gun fire in basic training. An aging sergeant with gray hair stood up, arms spread wide like a TV host, and screamed, “STAWWWWP! ” at the top of his lungs. Heavy fire from both sides homed in on him and he began to jig-a-jig like a disintegrating puppet. The roar of the guns and the screams of the dying and wounded made the audio needles in the control room jump over to + 50 dB.

The camera operator fell forward over the handle that controlled his camera, and those watching were now given only a merciful view of the studio ceiling for the rest of the exchange. The gunfire diminished over a period of five minutes to isolated explosions, then to nothing. Only the screams went on.

At five minutes past eleven, the studio ceiling was replaced on home screens by a picture of a cartoon man who was staring glumly at a cartoon TV. On the cartoon TV was a sign that said: SORRY, WE’RE HAVING PROBLEMS!

As the evening wound toward its close, that was true of almost everyone.

In Des Moines, at 11:30 P.M., CST, an old Buick covered with religious stickers—HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS, among others—cruised the deserted downtown streets relentlessly. There had been a fire in Des Moines earlier in the day that had burned most of the south side of Hull Avenue and Grandview Junior College; later there had been a riot that gutted most of the downtown area.

When the sun went down, these streets had been filled with restlessly circling crowds of people, most of them under twenty-five, many riding choppers. They had broken windows, stolen TV sets, filled their gas tanks at service stations while watching for anyone who might have a gun. Now the streets were empty. Some of them—the bikers, mainly—were kicking out their remaining jams on Interstate 80. But most of them had crept into houses and locked the doors, already suffering with superflu or only terror of it as daylight left this flat green land. Now Des Moines looked like the aftermath of some monster New Year’s Eve party after sodden sleep, had claimed the last of the revelers. The Buick’s tires whispered and crunched over the broken glass in the street and turned west from Fourteenth onto Euclid Avenue, passing two cars that had crashed head-on and now lay on their sides with their bumpers interlaced like lovers after a successful double homicide. There was a loudspeaker on top of the Buick’s roof, and now it began to give off amplified boops and beeps, followed by the scratchy sounds of an old record’s opening grooves, and then, blaring up and down the spectral, deserted streets of Des Moines came the sweetly droning voice of Mother Maybelle Carter, singing “Keep on the Sunny Side.”

Keep on the sunny side,

Always on the sunny side,

Keep on the sunny side of life,

Though your problems may be many

It will seem you don’t have any

If you keep on the sunny side of life…

The old Buick cruised on and on, making figure-eights, loops, sometimes circling the same block three or four times. When it hit a bump (or rolled over a body), the record would skip.

At twenty minutes to midnight, the Buick pulled over to the curb and idled. Then it began to roll again. The loudspeaker blared Elvis Presley singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” and a night wind soughed through the trees and stirred a final whiff of smoke from the smoldering ruins of the junior college.

From the President’s speech, delivered at 9 P.M., EST, not seen in many areas.

“… a great nation such as this must do. We cannot afford to jump at shadows like small children in a dark room; but neither can we afford to take this serious outbreak of influenza lightly. My fellow Americans, I urge you to stay at home. If you feel ill, stay in bed, take aspirin, and drink plenty of clear liquids. Be confident that you will feel better in a week at most. Let me repeat what I said at the beginning of my talk to you this evening: There is no truth—no truth —to the rumor that this strain of flu is fatal. In the greatest majority of cases, the person afflicted can expect to be up and around and feeling fine within a week. Further—”

note 2

“Further, there has been a vicious rumor promulgated by certain radical anti-establishment groups that this strain of influenza has been somehow bred by this government for some possible military use. Fellow Americans, this is a flat-out falsehood, and I want to brand it as such right here and now. This country signed the revised Geneva Accords on poison gas, nerve gas, and germ warfare in good conscience and in good faith. We have not now nor have we ever—”

note 3

“—have we ever been a party to the clandestine manufacture of substances outlawed by the Geneva Convention. This is a moderately serious outbreak of influenza, no more and no less. We have reports tonight of outbreaks in a score of other countries, including Russia and Red China. Therefore we—”

note 4

“—we ask you to remain calm and secure in the knowledge that late this week or early next, a flu vaccine will be available for those not already on the mend. National Guardsmen have been called out in some areas to protect the populace against hooligans, vandals, and scare-mongers, but there is absolutely no truth to the rumors that some cities have been ‘occupied’ by regular army forces or that the news has been managed. My fellow Americans, this is a flat-out falsehood, and I want to brand it as such right here and…”

Graffito written on the front of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta in red spray paint:

“Dear Jesus. I will see you soon. Your friend, America. PS. I hope you will still have some vacancies by the end of the week.”

Chapter 27

Larry Underwood sat on a bench in Central Park on the morning of June 27, looking into the menagerie. Behind him, Fifth Avenue was crazily jammed with cars, all of them silent now, their owners dead or fled. Farther down Fifth, many of the posh shops were smoking rubble.

From where Larry sat he could see a lion, an antelope, a zebra, and some sort of monkey. All but the monkey were dead. They had not died of the flu, Larry judged; they had gotten no food or water for God knew how long, and that had killed them. All but the monkey, and in the three hours that Larry had been sitting here, the monkey had moved only four or five times. The monkey had been smart enough to outwit starvation or death by thirst—so far—but it surely had a good case of superflu. That was one monkey who was hurtin for certain. It was a hard old world.

To his right, the clock with all the animals chimed the hour of eleven. The clockwork figures which had once delighted all children now played to an empty house. The bear tooted his horn, a clockwork monkey who would never get sick (but who might eventually run down) played a tambourine, the elephant beat his drum with his trunk. Heavy tunes, baby, heavy fucking tunes. End of the World Suite Arranged for Clockwork Figures.

After a bit the clock fell silent and he could hear the hoarse shouting again, now mercifully faint with distance. The monster-shouter was somewhere off to Larry’s left this fine forenoon, perhaps in the Heckscher Playground. Maybe he would fall into the wading pool there and drown.

“Monsters coming!” the faint, hoarse voice cried. The overcast had broken this morning, and the day was bright and hot. A bee cruised past Larry’s nose, circled one of the nearby flowerbeds, and made a three-point landing on a peony. From the menagerie came the soothing, soporific drone of the flies as they landed on the dead animals.

“Monsters coming now!” The monster-shouter was a tall man who looked to be in his middle sixties. Larry had first heard him the night before, which he had spent in the Sherry-Netherland. With night lying over the unnaturally quiet city, the faint, howling voice had seemed sonorous and dark, the voice of a lunatic Jeremiah floating through the streets of Manhattan, echoing, rebounding, distorting. Larry, lying sleepless in a queen-sized double with every light in the suite blazing, had become irrationally convinced that the monster-shouter was coming for him, seeking him out, the way the creatures of his frequent bad dreams sometimes did. For a long time it had seemed that the voice was drawing ever closer—Monsters coming! Monsters on the way! They’re in the suburbs! —and Larry became convinced that the suite’s door, which he had triple-locked, would burst inward and that the monster-shouter would be there… not a human being at all but a gigantic troll-thing with the head of a dog and saucer-sized fly eyes and champing teeth.

But earlier this morning Larry had seen him in the park and he was only a crazy old man wearing corduroy pants and zoris and horn-rimmed glasses with one bow taped. Larry had tried to speak to him and the monster-shouter had run in terror, crying back over his shoulder that the monsters would be in the streets at any moment. He had tripped over an ankle-high wire fence and went sprawling on one of the bikepaths with a loud comic thwap! sound, his glasses flying off but not shattering. Larry had gone to him, but before he could get there, the monster-shouter had scooped up his glasses and was gone toward the mall, crying his endless warning. So Larry’s opinion of him had swung from extreme terror to utter boredom and mild annoyance in the space of twelve hours.

There were other people in the park; Larry had spoken to a few of them. They were all pretty much the same, and Larry supposed that he himself wasn’t much different. They were dazed, their speech disjointed, and they seemed helpless to stop reaching for your sleeve with their hands as they talked. They had stories to tell. All the stories were the same. Their friends and relatives were dead or dying. There had been shooting in the streets, there had been an inferno on Fifth Avenue, was it true that Tiffany’s was gone, could that be true? Who was going to clean up? Who was going to collect the garbage? Should they get out of New York? They had heard that troops were guarding all the places where one could hope to do this. One woman was terrified that the rats were going to rise up out of the subways and inherit the earth, reminding Larry uneasily of his own thoughts on the day he had first returned to New York. A young man munching Fritos from a gigantic bag told Larry conversationally that he was going to fulfill a lifetime ambition. He was going to Yankee Stadium, run around the outfield naked, and then masturbate on home plate. “Chance of a lifetime, man,” he told Larry, winked with both eyes, and then wandered off, eating Fritos.

Many of the people in the park were sick, but not many had died there. Perhaps they had uneasy thoughts of being munched for dinner by the animals, and they had crawled indoors when they felt the end was near. Larry had had only one confrontation with death this morning, and one was all he wanted. He had walked up Transverse Number One to the comfort station there. He had opened the door and a grinning dead man with maggots crawling briskly hither and yon on his face had been seated inside, his hands settled on his bare thighs, his sunken eyes staring into Larry’s own. A sickening sweet smell bloated out at Larry as if the man sitting there was a rancid bonbon, a sweet treat which, in all the confusion, had been left for the flies. Larry slammed the door shut, but belatedly: he lost the cornflakes he had eaten for breakfast and then dry-heaved until he was afraid he might rupture some of his inner workings. God; if You’re there, he had prayed as he stumbled back toward the menagerie, if You’re taking requests today, Big Fella, mine is not to have to look at anything else like that today. The kooks are bad enough, something like that is more than I can take. Thank You so much.

Now, sitting on this bench (the monster-shouter had moved out of earshot, at least temporarily), Larry found himself thinking about the World Series five years ago. It was good to remember that because, it now seemed to him, that was the last time he had been completely happy, his physical condition tiptop, his mind resting easily and not working against itself.

That had been just after he and Rudy split up. That had been a damn piss-poor thing, that split-up, and if he ever saw Rudy again (never happen, his mind told him with a sigh), Larry was going to apologize. He would get down and kiss Rudy’s shoetops, if that was what Rudy needed to make it okay again.

They had started off across the country in a wheezy old 1968 Mercury that had shat its transmission in Omaha. From there on they would work for a couple of weeks, hitchhike west for a while, work another couple of weeks, then hitchhike some more. For a while they worked on a farm in western Nebraska, just below the panhandle, and one night Larry had lost sixty dollars in a poker game. The next day he’d had to ask Rudy for a loan to tide him over. They had arrived in L.A. a month later, and Larry had been the first to land a job—if you wanted to call washing dishes for the minimum wage working. One night about three weeks later, Rudy had broached the subject of the loan. He said he’d met a guy who’d recommended a really good employment agency, never miss, but the fee was twenty-five bucks. Which happened to be the amount of the loan he had made to Larry after the poker game. Ordinarily, Rudy said, he never would have asked, but—

Larry had protested that he’d paid the loan back. They were square. If Rudy wanted the twenty-five, okay, but he just hoped Rudy wasn’t trying to get him to pay off the same loan twice.

Rudy said he didn’t want a gift; he wanted the money he was owed, and he wasn’t interested in a lot of Larry Underwood bullshit, either. Jesus Christ, Larry said, trying a good-humored laugh. I never thought I’d need a receipt from you, Rudy. Guess I was wrong.

It had escalated into a full-scale argument, almost to the point of blows. At the end Rudy’s face had been flushed. That’s you, Larry, he’d shouted. That’s you all over. That’s how you are. I used to think I’d never learn my lesson, but I think I finally did. Fuck off, Larry.

Rudy left, and Larry followed him to the stairs of the cheap rooming house, digging his wallet out of his back pocket. There were three tens neatly folded into the secret compartment behind the photos and he had heaved them after Rudy. Go on, you cheap little lying fuck! Take it! Take the goddam money!

Rudy had slammed the outer door open with a bang and had gone out into the night, toward whatever tin destiny the Rudys of this world can expect. He didn’t look back. Larry had stood at the top of the stairs, breathing hard, and after a minute or so he had looked around for his three ten-dollar bills, gathered them up, and put them away again.

Thinking of the incident now and then over the years, he had become more and more sure that Rudy had been right. Actually, he was positive. Even if he had paid Rudy back, the two of them had been friends since grade school, and it seemed (looking back) that Larry had always been a dime short for the Saturday matinee because he’d bought some licorice whips or a couple of candy bars on the way over to Rudy’s, or borrowing a nickel to round out his school lunch money or getting seven cents to make up carfare. Over the years he must have bummed fifty dollars in change from Rudy, maybe a hundred. When Rudy had braced him for that twenty-five, Larry could remember the way he had tightened up. His brain had subtracted twenty-five dollars from the three tens, and had said to him: That only leaves five bucks. Therefore, you already paid him back. I’m not sure just when, but you did. Let’s have no more discussion of the matter. And no more there had been.

But after that he had been alone in the city. He had no friends, hadn’t even attempted to make any at the café on Encino where he worked. The fact was, he’d believed everyone who worked there, from the evil-tempered head cook to the ass-wiggling, gum-chewing waitresses, had been a dipstick. Yes, he had really believed everyone at Tony’s Feed Bag was a dipstick but him, the sainted, soon-to-succeed (and you better believe it) Larry Underwood. Alone in a world of dipsticks, he felt as achy as a whipped dog and as homesick as a man marooned on a desert island. He began to think more and more of buying a Greyhound AmeriPass and dragging himself back to New York.

In another month, maybe even another two weeks, he would have done it, too… except for Yvonne.

He met Yvonne Wetterlen at a movie theater two blocks from the club where she worked as a topless dancer. When the second show let out, she had been weeping and searching around her seat on the aisle for her purse. It had her driver’s license in it, also her checkbook, her union card, her one credit card, a photostat of her birth certificate, and her Social Security card. Although he was positive it had been stolen, Larry did not say so and helped her look for it. And sometimes it seemed they really must live in a world of wonders, because he had found it three rows down just as they were about to give up. He guessed it had probably migrated down there as a result of people shuffling their feet as they watched the picture, which had really been pretty boring. She had hugged him and wept as she thanked him. Larry, feeling like Captain America, told her he wished he could take her out for burgers or something to celebrate, only he was really strapped for cash. Yvonne said she’d treat. Larry, that great prince, had been pretty sure she would.

They started to see each other; in less than two weeks they had a regular thing going. Larry found a better job, clerking in a bookstore, and had gotten a gig singing with a group called The Hotshot Rhythm Rangers & All-Time Boogie Band. The name was the best thing about the group, actually, but the rhythm guitarist had been Johnny McCall, who later went on to form the Tattered Remnants, and that was actually a pretty good band.

Larry and Yvonne moved in together, and for Larry everything changed. Part of it was just having a place, his own place, that he was paying half the rent for. Yvonne put up some curtains, they got some cheap thrift-shop furniture and refinished it together, other members of the band and some of Yvonne’s friends started to drop around. The place was bright in the daytime, and at night a fragrant California breeze, which seemed redolent with oranges even when the only thing it was really redolent with was smog, would drift in through the windows. Sometimes no one would come and he and Yvonne would just watch television, and sometimes she would bring him a can of beer and sit on the arm of his chair and rub his neck. It was his own place, a home, goddammit, and sometimes he’d lie awake in bed at night with Yvonne sleeping beside him, and marvel at how good he felt. Then he would slip smoothly into sleep, and it was the sleep of the just, and he never did think of Rudy Marks at all. At least, not much.

They lived together for fourteen months, all of it fine until the last six weeks or so, when Yvonne got to be kind of a bitch, and the part of it that summed it all up for Larry was that World Series. He would put in his day at the bookstore, then go over to Johnny McCall’s house and the two of them—the whole group only practiced on weekends, because the other two guys had night jobs—would work on some new stuff or maybe just hack away at the great oldies, the ones Johnny called “real bar-rippers,” tunes like “Nobody but Me” and “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love.”

Then he’d go home, to his home, and Yvonne would have dinner all ready. Not just TV dinners, shit like that, either. Real home cooking. Girl was well trained. And afterward they would go into the living room and turn on the tube and watch the Series. Later, love. It had seemed all right, it had all seemed his. There hadn’t been one single thing hassling his mind. Nothing had been so good since then. Nothing.

He realized he was crying a little bit, and he felt a momentary disgust that he should be sitting here on a bench in Central Park, crying in the sun like some wretched old man on a pension. Then it occurred to him that he had a right to cry for the things he had lost, that he had a right to be in shock if that was what this was.

His mother had died three days ago. She had been lying on a cot in the hallway of Mercy Hospital when she died, crammed in with thousands of others who were also busy dying. Larry had been kneeling beside her when she went, and he had thought he might go mad, watching his mother die while all around him rose the stench of urine and feces, the hell’s babble of the delirious, the choking, the insane, the screams of the bereaved. She hadn’t known him at the end; there had been no final moment of recognition. Her chest had finally just stopped in mid-heave and had settled very slowly, like the weight of an automobile settling down on a flat tire. He had crouched beside her for ten minutes or so, not knowing what to do, thinking in a confused way that he ought to wait until a death certificate was signed or someone asked him what had happened. But it was obvious what had happened, it was happening everywhere. It was just as obvious that the place was a madhouse. No sober young doctor was going to come along, express sympathy, and then start the machinery of death. Sooner or later his mother would just be carried away like a sack of oats, and he didn’t want to watch that. Her purse was under the cut. He found a pen and a bobby pin and her checkbook. He tore a deposit slip from the back of her book and wrote on it her name, her address, and after a moment’s calculation, her age. He clipped it to her blouse pocket with the bobby pin and began to cry. He kissed her cheek and fled, crying. He felt like a deserter. Being on the street had been a little better, although at that time the streets had been full of crazy people, sick people, and circling army patrols. And now he could sit on this bench and grieve for more general things: his mother’s loss of her retirement, the loss of his own career, for that time in L.A. when he had sat watching the World Series with Yvonne, knowing there would be bed and love later, and for Rudy. Most of all he grieved for Rudy and wished he had paid Rudy his twenty-five dollars with a grin and a shrug, saving the six years that had been lost.

The monkey died at quarter of twelve.

It was on its perch, just sitting there apathetically with its hands drawn up under its chin, and then its eyelids fluttered and it fell forward and hit the cement with a final horrid smack.

Larry didn’t want to sit there anymore. He got up and began to walk aimlessly down toward the mall with its large bandshell. He had heard the monster-shouter some fifteen minutes ago, very far away, but now the only sound in the park seemed to be his own heels clicking on the cement and the twitter of the birds. Birds apparently didn’t catch the flu. Good for them.

When he neared the bandshell, he saw that a woman was sitting on one of the benches in front of it. She was maybe fifty, but had taken great pains to look younger. She was dressed in expensive-looking gray-green slacks and a silk off-the-shoulder peasant blouse… except, Larry thought, as far as he knew, peasants can’t afford silk. She looked around at the sound of. Larry’s footsteps. She had a pill in one hand and tossed it casually into her mouth like a peanut.

“Hi,” Larry said. Her face was calm, her eyes blue. Sharp intelligence gleamed in them. She was wearing gold-rimmed glasses, and her pocketbook was trimmed with something that certainly looked like mink. There were four rings on her fingers: a wedding band, two diamonds, and a cat’s-eye emerald.

“Uh, I’m not dangerous,” he said. It was a ridiculous thing to say, he supposed, but she looked like she might be wearing about $20,000 on her fingers. Of course, they might be fakes, but she didn’t look like a woman who would have much use for paste and zircons.

“No,” she said, “you don’t look dangerous. You’re not sick, either.” Her voice rose a little on the last word, making her statement into a polite half-question. She wasn’t as calm as she looked at first glance; there was a little tic working on the side of her neck, and behind the lively intelligence in the blue eyes was the same dull shock that Larry had seen in his own eyes this morning as he shaved.

“No, I don’t think I am. Are you?”

“Not at all. Did you know you have an ice cream wrapper on your shoe?”

He looked down and saw that he did. It made him blush because he suspected that she would have informed him that his fly was open in that same tone. He stood on one leg and tried to pull it off.

“You look like a stork,” she said. “Sit down and try it. My name is Rita Blakemoor.”

“Pleased to know you. I’m Larry Underwood.”

He sat down. She offered her hand and he shook it lightly, his fingers pressing against her rings. Then he gingerly removed the ice cream wrapper from his shoe and dropped it primly into a can beside the bench that said IT’S YOUR PARK SO KEEP IT CLEAN! It struck him funny, the whole operation. He threw his head back and laughed. It was the first real laugh since the day he had come home to find his mother lying on the floor of her apartment, and he was enormously relieved to find that the good feel of laughing hadn’t changed. It rose from your belly and escaped from between your teeth in the same jolly go-to-hell way.

Rita Blakemoor was smiling both at him and with him, and he was struck again by her casual yet elegant handsomeness. She looked like a woman from an Irwin Shaw novel. Nightwork, maybe, or the one they had made for TV when he was just a kid.

“When I heard you coming, I almost hid,” she said. “I thought you were probably the man with the broken glasses and the queer philosophy.”

“The monster-shouter?”

“Is that what you call him or what he calls himself?”

“What I call him.”

“Very apt,” she said, opening her mink-trimmed (maybe) bag and taking out a package of menthol cigarettes. “He reminds me of an insane Diogenes.”

“Yeah, just lookin for an honest monster,” Larry said, and laughed again.

She lit her cigarette and chuffed out smoke.

“He’s not sick, either,” Larry said. “But most of the others are.”

“The doorman at my building seems very well,” Rita said. “He’s still on duty. I tipped him five dollars when I came out this morning. I don’t know if I tipped him for being very well or for being on duty. What do you think?”

“I really don’t know you well enough to say.”

“No, of course you don’t.” She put her cigarettes back in her bag and he saw that there was a revolver in there. She followed his gaze. “It was my husband’s. He was a career executive with a major New York bank. That’s just how he put it when anyone asked what he did to keep himself in cocktail onions. I-am-a-career-executive-with-a-major-New-York-bank. He died two years ago. He was at a luncheon with one of those Arabs who always look as if they have rubbed all the visible areas of their skin with Brylcreem. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry.”

A finch landed in front of them and pecked the ground.

“He was insanely afraid of burglars, so he had this gun. Do guns really kick and make a loud noise when they go off, Larry?”

Larry, who had never fired a gun in his life, said, “I don’t think one that size would kick much. Is it a .38?”

“I believe it’s a .32.” She took it out of her bag and he saw there were also a good many small pill-bottles in there. This time she didn’t follow his gaze; she was looking at a small chinaberry tree about fifteen paces away. “I believe I’ll try it. Do you think I can hit that tree?”

“I don’t know,” he said apprehensively. “I don’t really think—”

She pulled the trigger and the gun went off with a fairly impressive bang. A small hole appeared in the chinaberry tree. “Bull’s-eye,” she said, and blew smoke from the pistol barrel like a gunfighter.

“Real good,” Larry said, and when she put the gun back in her purse, his heart resumed something like its normal rhythm.

“I couldn’t shoot a person with it. I’m quite sure of that. And soon there won’t be anyone to shoot, will there?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“You were looking at my rings. Would you like one?”

“Huh? No!” He began to blush again.

“As a banker, my husband believed in diamonds. He believed in them the way the Baptists believe in Revelations. I have a great many diamonds, and they are all insured. We not only owned a piece of the rock, my Harry and I, I sometimes believed we held a lien on the whole goddam thing. But if someone should want my diamonds, I would hand them over. After all, they’re only rocks again, aren’t they?”

“I guess that’s right.”

“Of course,” she said, and the tic on the side of her neck jumped again. “And if a stick-up man wanted them, I’d not only hand them over, I would give him the address of Cartier’s. Their selection of rocks is much better than my own.”

“What are you going to do now?” Larry asked her.

“What would you suggest?”

“I just don’t know,” Larry said, and sighed.

“My answer exactly.”

“You know something? I saw a guy this morning who said he was going out to Yankee Stadium and je… and masturbate on home plate.” He could feel himself blushing again.

“What an awful walk for him,” she said. “Why didn’t you suggest something closer?” She sighed, and the sigh turned into a shudder. She opened her purse, took out a bottle of pills, and popped a gel capsule into her mouth.

“What’s that?” Larry asked.

“Vitamin E,” she said with a glittering, false smile. The tic in her neck jumped once or twice and then stopped. She became serene again.

“There’s nobody in the bars,” Larry said suddenly. “I went into Pat’s on Forty-third and it was totally empty. They have that great big mahogany bar and I went behind it and poured myself a water glass full of Johnnie Walker. Then I didn’t even want to be there. So I left it sitting on the bar and got out.”

They sighed together, like a chorus.

“You’re very pleasant to be with,” she said. “I like you very much. And it’s wonderful that you’re not crazy.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Blakemoor.” He was surprised and pleased.

“Rita. I’m Rita.”

“Okay.”

“Are you hungry, Larry?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.”

“Perhaps you’d take the lady to lunch.”

“That would be a pleasure.”

She stood up and offered him her arm with a slightly deprecatory smile. As he linked his through it, he caught a whiff of her sachet, a smell that was at once comforting and disquietingly adult in its associations for him, almost old. His mother had worn sachet on their many trips to the movies together.

Then he forgot about it as they walked out of the park and up Fifth Avenue, away from the dead monkey, the monster-shouter, and the dark sweet treat sitting endlessly inside the comfort station on Transverse Number One. She chattered incessantly, and later he could remember no one thing she had chattered about (yes, just one: she had always dreamed, she said, of strolling up Fifth Avenue on the arm of a handsome young man, a man who was young enough to have been her own son but who wasn’t), but he recalled the walk often just the same, especially after she began to jitter apart like some indifferently made toy. Her beautiful smile, her light, cynical, casual chatter, the whisper of her slacks.

They went into a steak house and Larry cooked, a trifle clumsily, but she applauded each course: the steak, the french fries, the instant coffee, the strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Chapter 28

There was a strawberry pie in the fridge. It was covered with Saran Wrap and after looking at it for a long time with dull and bemused eyes, Frannie took it out. She set it on the counter and cut a wedge. A strawberry fell to the counter with a fat plop as she was transferring the piece of pie to a small plate. She picked the berry up and ate it. She wiped up the small splotch of juice on the counter with a dishrag. She put the Saran Wrap back over the remains of the pie and stuck it back in the refrigerator.

She was turning back to get her pie when she happened to glance at the knife-rack beside the cupboards. Her father had made it. It was two magnetized runners. The knives hung from them, blades down. The early afternoon sun was gleaming on them. She stared at the knives for a long time, the dull, half-curious cast of her eyes never changing, her hands working restlessly in the folds of the apron tied around her waist.

At last, some fifteen minutes later, she remembered that she had been in the middle of something. What? A line of scripture, a paraphrase, occurred to her for no good reason: Before removing the mote in thy neighbor’s eye, attend the beam in thine own. She considered it. Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered her. What sort of beam? Moonbeam? Roofbeam? There were also flashlight beams and beaming faces and there had been a New York mayor named Abe Beame, not to mention a song she had learned in Vacation Bible School—“I’ll Be a Sunbeam for Him.”

–before removing the mote in thy neighbor’s eye —

But it wasn’t an eye; it was a pie. She turned to it and saw there was a fly crawling on her pie. She waved a hand at it. Bye-bye, Mr. Fly, say so long to Frannie’s pie.

She regarded the piece of pie for a long time. Her mother and father were both dead, she knew. Her mother had died in the Sanford Hospital and her father, who had once made a little girl feel welcome in his shop, was lying dead in bed above her head. Why did everything have to keep coming in rhymes? Coming and going in such dreadful cheap jingles and jangles, like the idiot mnemonics that recur in fevers? My dog has fleas, they bite his knees —

She came to her senses suddenly, and a kind of terror twisted through her. There was a hot smell in the room. Something was burning.

Frannie jerked her head around, saw a skillet of french fries in oil she had put on the stove and then forgotten. Smoke was billowing up from the pan in a stinking cloud. Grease was flying out of the pan in angry splatters, and the splatters that landed on the burner were flaring alight and then going out, as if an invisible butane lighter was being flicked by an invisible hand. The cooking surface of the pan was black.

She touched the handle of the pan and drew her fingers back with a little gasp. It was now too hot to touch. She grabbed a dish-towel, wrapped it around the handle, and quickly carried the utensil, sizzling like a dragon, out through the back door. She set it down on the top step of the porch. The smell of honeysuckle and the droning of the bees came to her, but she barely noticed. For a moment the thick, dull blanket which had swaddled all her emotional responses for the last four days was pierced, and she was acutely frightened. Frightened? No—in a state of low terror, only a pace away from panic.

She could remember peeling the potatoes and putting them into the Wesson Oil to cook. Now she could remember. But for a while there she had just… whew! She had just forgotten.

Standing on the porch, dish-towel still clutched in one hand, she tried to remember exactly what her train of thought had been after she had put the french fries on to cook. It seemed very important.

Well, first she had thought that a meal which consisted of nothing but french fries wasn’t very nutritious. Then she’d thought that if the McDonald’s down on Route 1 had still been open, she wouldn’t have had to cook them herself, and she could have had a burger, too. Just take the car and cruise up to the take-out window. She would get a Quarter Pounder and the large-size fries, the ones that came in the bright red cardboard container. Little grease-spots on the inside. Undoubtedly unhealthy, indubitably comforting. And besides—pregnant women get strange cravings.

That brought her to the next link in the chain. Thoughts of strange cravings had led to thoughts of the strawberry pie lurking in the fridge. Suddenly it had seemed to her that she wanted a piece of that strawberry pie more than she wanted anything in the world. So she had gotten it, but somewhere along the line her eye had been caught by the knife-rack her father had made for her mother (Mrs. Edmonton, the doctor’s wife, had been so envious of that knife-rack that Peter had made one for her two Christmases ago), and her mind had just… short-circuited. Motes… beams… flies…

“Oh God,” she said to the empty back yard and her father’s unweeded garden. She sat down and put the apron over her face and cried.

When the tears dried up, she seemed to feel a little better… but she was still frightened. Am I losing my mind? she asked herself. Is this the way it happens, the way it feels, when you have a nervous breakdown or whatever you want to call it?

Since her father had died at half past eight the night before, her ability to focus mentally seemed to have gotten fragmented. She would forget things she had been doing, her mind would go off on some dreamy tangent, or she would simply sit, not thinking of anything at all, no more aware of the world than a head of cabbage.

After her father died she had sat beside his bed for a long time. At last she had gone downstairs and turned on the TV. No particular reason; like the man said, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. The only station broadcasting had been the NBC affiliate in Portland, WCSH, and they seemed to be broadcasting some sort of crazy trial show. A black man, who looked like a Ku Klux Klansman’s worst nightmare of headhunting Africans, had been pretending to execute white men with a pistol while other men in the audience applauded. It had to be pretend, of course—they didn’t show things like that on TV if they were real—but it hadn’t looked like pretend. It reminded her crazily of Alice in Wonderland, only it wasn’t the Red Queen yelling “Off with their heads!” in this case, but… what? Who? The Black Prince, she had supposed. Not that the beef in the loincloth had looked much like Prince.

Later in the program (how much later she could not have said), some other men broke into the studio and there was a fire-fight which was even more realistically staged than the executions had been. She saw men, nearly decapitated by heavy-caliber bullets, thrown backward with blood bursting from their shredded necks in gaudy arterial pumps. She remembered thinking in her disorganized way that they should have put one of those signs on the screen from time to time, the ones that warned parents to put the kiddies to bed or change the channel. She also remembered thinking that WCSH might get their license to broadcast lifted all the same; it really was an awfully bloody program.

She switched it off when the camera swung up, showing only the studio-lights hanging down from the ceiling, and lay back on the couch, looking at her own ceiling. She had fallen asleep there, and this morning she was more than half convinced that she had dreamed the entire program. And that was the nub, really: everything had come to seem like a nightmare filled with free-floating anxieties. It had begun with the death of her mother; the death of her father had only intensified what had already been there. As in Alice, things just got curiouser and curiouser.

There had been a special town meeting which her father had attended even though he had been getting sick by then himself. Frannie, feeling drugged and unreal—but physically no different than ever—had gone with him.

The town hall had been crowded, much more crowded than it was for town meetings in late February or early March. There was a lot of sniffling and coughing and kerchooing. The attendees were frightened and ready to be angry at the least excuse. They spoke in loud, hoarse voices. They stood up. They shook their fingers. They pontificated. Many of them—not just the women, either—had been in tears.

The upshot had been a decision to close off the town entirely. No one would be allowed in. If people wanted to leave, that was fine, as long as they understood that they couldn’t come in again. The roads leading in and out of town—most notably US 1—were to be barricaded with cars (after a shouting match that lasted half an hour, that was amended to town-owned Public Works trucks), and volunteers would stand watches at these roadblocks with shotguns. Those trying to use US 1 to go north or south would be directed up north to Wells or down south to York, where they could get on Interstate 95 and thus detour around Ogunquit. Anyone who still tried to get through would be shot. Dead? Someone asked. You bet, several others answered.

There was a small contingent of about twenty which maintained that those already sick should be put out of town at once. They were overwhelmingly voted down because by the evening of the twenty-fourth, when the meeting was held, almost everyone in town who was not sick had close relatives or friends who were. Many of them believed the newscasts, which said that a vaccine would be available soon. How, they argued, would they ever be able to look each other in the face again if it all turned out to be just a scary close call, and they had overreacted to it by putting their own out like pariah dogs?

It was suggested that all the sick summer people be put out, then.

The summer people, a large contingent of them, pointed out grimly that they had supported the town’s schools, roads, indigent, and public beaches for years with the taxes they paid on their cottages. Businesses that couldn’t break even from mid-September to mid-June stayed afloat because of their summer dollars. If they were to be treated in such a cavalier fashion, the people of Ogunquit could be sure that they would never come back. They could go back to lobstering and clamming and grubbing quahogs out of the dirt for a living. The motion to escort sick summer people out of town was defeated by a comfortable margin.

By midnight the barriers were set up, and by dawn the next morning, the morning of the twenty-fifth, several people had been shot at the barriers, most just wounded, but three or four killed. Almost all of them were people coming north, streaming out of Boston, stricken with fear, panic-stupid. Some of them went back to York to get on the turnpike willingly enough, but others were too crazy to understand and tried to either ram the barriers or swing around them on the soft shoulders of the road. They were dealt with.

But by that evening, most of the men manning the barricades were sick themselves, glowing bright with fever, constantly propping their shotguns between their feet so they could blow their noses. Some, like Freddy Delancey and Curtis Beauchamp, simply fell down unconscious and were later driven back to the jackleg infirmary that had been set up over the town hall, and there they died.

By yesterday morning Frannie’s father, who had opposed the whole idea of the barricades, had taken to his bed and Frannie was staying in to nurse him. He wouldn’t allow her to take him to the infirmary. If he was going to die, he told Frannie, he wanted to do it here at home, decently, in private.

By afternoon, the flow of traffic had mostly dried up. Gus Dinsmore, the public beach parking lot attendant, said he guessed that so many cars must be just stopped dead along the road that even those manned (or womaned) by able drivers would be unable to move. It was just as well, because by the afternoon of the twenty-fifth there had been less than three dozen men capable of standing watch. Gus, who felt perfectly fine until yesterday, had come down with a runny nose himself. In fact, the only person in town besides herself who seemed all right was Amy Lauder’s sixteen-year-old brother Harold. Amy herself had died just before that first town meeting, her wedding dress still hung in the closet, unworn.

Fran hadn’t been out today, hadn’t seen anyone since Gus had come by yesterday afternoon to check on her. She had heard engines a few times this morning, and once the close-together double explosions of a shotgun, but that was all. The steady, unbroken silence added to her sense of unreality.

And now there were these questions to consider. Flies… eyes… pies. Frannie found herself listening to the refrigerator. It had an automatic ice-maker attachment, and every twenty seconds or so there would be a cold thump somewhere inside as it made another cube.

She sat there for almost an hour, her plate before her, the dull, half-questioning expression on her face. Little by little another thought began to surface in her mind—two thoughts, actually, that seemed at once connected and totally unrelated. Were they maybe interlocking parts of a bigger thought? Keeping an ear open for the sound of dropping icecubes inside the refrigerator’s icemaking gadget, she examined them. The first thought was that her father was dead; he had died at home, and he might have liked that.

The second thought had to do with the day. It was a beautiful summer’s day, flawless, the kind that the tourists came to the Maine seacoast for. You don’t come to swim because the water’s never really warm enough for that; you come to be knocked out by the day.

The sun was bright and Frannie could read the thermometer outside the back kitchen window. The mercury stood just under 80. It was a beautiful day and her father was dead. Was there any connection, other than the obvious tear-jerky one?

She frowned over it, her eyes confused and apathetic. Her mind circled the problem, then drifted away to think of other things. But it always drifted back.

It was a beautiful warm day and her father was dead.

That brought it home to her all at once and her eyes squeezed shut, as if from a blow.

At the same time her hands jerked involuntarily on the tablecloth, yanking her plate off onto the floor. It shattered like a bomb and Frannie screamed, her hands going to her cheeks, digging furrows there. The wandering, apathetic vagueness disappeared from her eyes, which were suddenly sharp and direct. It was as if she had been slapped hard or had an open bottle of ammonia waved under her nose.

You can’t keep a corpse in the house. Not in high summer.

The apathy began to creep back in, blurring the outlines of the thought. The full horror of it began to be obscured, cushioned. She began to listen for the clunk and drop of the icecubes again—

She fought it off. She got up, went to the sink, ran the cold water on full, and then splatted cupped handfuls against her cheeks, shocking her lightly perspiring skin.

She could drift away all she wanted, but first this thing had to be solved. It had to be. She couldn’t just let him lie in bed up there as June melted into July. It was too much like that Faulkner story that was in all the college anthologies. “A Rose for Emily.” The town fathers hadn’t known what that terrible smell was, but after a while it had gone away. It…it…

“No!” she cried out loud to the sunny kitchen. She began to pace, thinking about it. Her first thought was the local funeral home. But who would… would…

“Stop backing away from it!” she shouted furiously into the empty kitchen. “Who’s going to bury him?”

And at the sound of her own voice, the answer came. It was perfectly clear. She was, of course. Who else? She was.

It was two-thirty in the afternoon when she heard the car turn into the driveway, its heavy motor purring complacently, low with power. Frannie put the spade down on the edge of the hole—she was digging in the garden, between the tomatoes and the lettuces—and turned around, a little afraid.

The car was a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville, bottle green, and stepping out of it was fat sixteen-year-old Harold Lauder. Frannie felt an instant surge of distaste. She didn’t like Harold and didn’t know anyone who did, including his late sister Amy. Probably his mother had. But it struck Fran with a tired sort of irony that the only person left in Ogunquit besides herself should be one of the very few people in town she honestly didn’t like.

Harold edited the Ogunquit High School literary magazine and wrote strange short stories that were told in the present tense or with the point of view in the second person, or both. You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the racetrack stars —that was Harold’s style.

“He whacks off in his pants,” Amy had once confided to Fran. “How’s that for nasty? Whacks off in his pants and wears the same pair of undershorts until they’ll just about stand up by themselves.”

Harold’s hair was black and greasy. He was fairly tall, about six-one, but he was carrying nearly two hundred and forty pounds. He favored cowboy boots with pointed toes, wide leather garrison belts that he was constantly hitching up because his belly was considerably bigger than his butt, and flowered shirts that billowed on him like staysails. Frannie didn’t care how much he whacked off, how much weight he carried, or if he was imitating Wright Morris this week or Hubert Selby, Jr. But looking at him—she always felt uncomfortable and a little disgusted, as if she sensed by low-grade telepathy that almost every thought Harold had was coated lightly with slime. She didn’t think, even in a situation like this, that Harold could be dangerous, but he would probably be as unpleasant as always, perhaps more so.

He hadn’t seen her. He was looking up at the house. “Anybody home?” he shouted, then reached through the Cadillac’s window and honked the horn. The sound jagged on Frannie’s nerves. She would have kept silent, except that when Harold turned around to get back into the car, he would see the excavation, and her sitting on the end of it. For a moment she was tempted to crawl deeper into the garden and just lie low among the peas and beans until he got tired and went away.

Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. He’s another living human being, anyway.

“Over here, Harold,” she called.

Harold jumped, his large buttocks joggling inside his tight pants. Obviously he had just been going through the motions, not really expecting to find anyone. He turned around and Fran walked to the edge of the garden, brushing at her legs, resigned to being stared at in her white gym shorts and halter. Harold’s eyes crawled over her with great avidity as he came to meet her.

“Say, Fran,” he said happily.

“Hi, Harold.”

“I’d heard that you were having some success in resisting the dread disease, so I made this my first stop. I’m canvassing the township.” He smiled at her, revealing teeth that had, at best, a nodding acquaintance with his toothbrush.

“I was awfully sorry to hear about Amy, Harold. Are your mother and father—?”

“I’m afraid so,” Harold said. He bowed his head for a moment, then jerked it up, making his clotted hair fly. “But life goes on, does it not?”

“I guess it does,” Fran said wanly. His eyes were on her beasts again, dancing across them, and she wished for a sweater.

“How do you like my car?”

“It’s Mr. Brannigan’s, isn’t it?” Roy Brannigan was a local realtor.

“It was,” Harold said indifferently. “I used to believe that, in these days of shortages, anyone who drove such a thyroidal monster ought to be hung from the nearest Sunoco sign, but all of that has changed. Less people means more petrol.” Petrol, Fran thought dazedly, he actually said petrol. “More everything,” Harold finished. His eyes took on a fugitive gleam as they dropped to the cup of her navel, rebounded to her face, dropped to her shorts, and bounced to her face again. His smile was both jolly and uneasy.

“Harold, if you’ll excuse me—”

“But whatever can you be doing, my child?”

The unreality was trying to creep back in again, and she found herself wondering just how much the human brain could be expected to stand before snapping like an overtaxed rubber band. My parents are dead, but I can take it. Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entire world, mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike—I can take it. I’m digging a hole in the garden my father was weeding only last week, and when it’s deep enough I guess I’m going to put him in it—I think I can take it. But Harold Lauder in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac, feeling me up with his eyes and calling me “my child”? I don’t know, my Lord. I just don’t know.

“Harold,” she said patiently. “I am not your child. I am five years older than you. It is physically impossible for me to be your child.”

“Just a figure of speech,” he said, blinking a little at her controlled ferocity. “Anyway, what is it? That hole?”

“A grave. For my father.”

“Oh,” Harold Lauder said in a small, uneasy voice.

“I’m going in to get a drink of water before I finish up. To be blunt, Harold, I’d just as soon you went away. I’m upset.”

“I can understand that,” he said stiffly. “But Fran… in the garden?”

She had started toward the house, but now she rounded on him, furious. “Well, what would you suggest? That I put him in a coffin and drag him out to the cemetery? What in the name of God for? He loved his garden! And what’s it to you, anyway? What business is it of yours?”

She was starting to cry. She turned and ran for the kitchen, almost running into the Cadillac’s front bumper. She knew Harold would be watching her jiggling buttocks, storing up the footage for whatever X-rated movie played constantly in his head, and that made her angrier, sadder, and more weepy than ever.

The screen door whacked flatly shut behind her. She went to the sink and drank three cold glasses of water, too quickly, and a silver spike of pain sank deeply into her forehead. Her surprised belly cramped and she hung over the porcelain sink for a moment, eyes slitted closed, waiting to see if she was going to throw up. After a moment her stomach told her it would take the cold water, at least on a trial basis.

“Fran?” The voice was low and hesitant.

She turned and saw Harold standing outside the screen, his hands dangling limply at his sides. He looked concerned and unhappy, and Fran suddenly felt badly for him. Harold Lauder tooling around this sad, ruined town in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac, Harold Lauder who had probably never had a date in his life and so affected what he probably thought of as worldly disdain. For dates, girls, friends, everything. Including himself, most likely.

“Harold, I’m sorry.”

“No, I didn’t have the right to say anything. Look, if you want me to, I can help.”

“Thank you, but I’d rather do it alone. It’s…”

“It’s personal. Of course, I understand.”

She could have gotten a sweater from the kitchen closet, but of course he would have known why and she didn’t want to embarrass him again. Harold was trying hard to be a good guy—something which must have been a little like speaking a foreign language. She went back out on the porch and for a moment they stood there looking at the garden, at the hole with the dirt thrown up around it. And the afternoon buzzed somnolently around them as if nothing had changed.

“What are you going to do?” she asked Harold.

“I don’t know,” he said. “You know…” He trailed off.

“What?”

“Well, it’s hard for me to say. I am not one of the most loved persons in this little patch of New England. I doubt if a statue would ever have been erected in my memory on the local common, even if I had become a famous writer, as I had once hoped. Parenthetically speaking, I believe I may be an old man with a beard down to my beltbuckle before there is another famous writer.”

She said nothing; only went on looking at him.

“So!” Harold exclaimed, and his body jerked as if the word had exploded out. “So I am forced to wonder at the unfairness of it. The unfairness seems, to me at least, so monstrous that it is easier to believe that the louts who attend our local citadel of learning have finally succeeded in driving me mad.”

He pushed his glasses up on his nose, and she noticed with sympathy how really horrible his acne problem was. Had anyone ever told him, she wondered, that soap and water would take care of some of that? Or had they all been too busy watching pretty, petite Amy as she zoomed through the University of Maine with a 3.8 average, graduating twenty-third in a class of over a thousand? Pretty Amy, who was so bright and vivacious where Harold was just abrasive.

“Mad,” Harold repeated softly. “I’ve been driving around town in a Cadillac on my learner’s permit. And look at these boots.” He pulled up the legs of his jeans a little, disclosing a gleaming pair of cowboy boots, complexly stitched. “Eighty-six dollars. I just went into the Shoe Boat and picked out my size. I feel like an imposter. An actor in a play. There have been moments today when I’ve been sure I was mad.”

“No,” Frannie said. He smelled like he hadn’t had a bath in three or four days, but this no longer disgusted her. “What’s that line? I’ll be in your dream if you’ll be in mine? We’re not crazy, Harold.”

“Maybe it would be better if we were.”

“Someone will come,” Frannie said. “After a while. After this disease, whatever it is, burns itself out.”

“Who?”

“Somebody in authority,” she said uncertainly. “Somebody who will… well… put things back in order.”

He laughed bitterly. “My dear child… sorry, Fran. Fran, it was the people in authority who did this. They’re good at putting things back in order. They’ve solved the depressed economy, pollution, the oil shortage, and the cold war, all at a stroke. Yeah, they put things in order, all right. They solved everything the same way Alexander solved the Gordian knot—by cutting it in two with his sword.”

“But it’s just a funny strain of the flu, Harold. I heard it on the radio—”

“Mother Nature just doesn’t work that way, Fran. Your somebody in authority got a bunch of bacteriologists, virologists, and epidemiologists together in some government installation to see how many funny bugs they could dream up. Bacteria. Viruses. Germ plasm, for all I know. And one day some well-paid toady said, ‘Look what I made. It kills almost everybody. Isn’t it great?’ And they gave him a medal, and a pay-raise, and a time-sharing condo, and then somebody spilled it.

“What are you going to do, Fran?”

“Bury my father,” she said softly.

“Oh… of course.” He looked at her for a moment and then said, very swiftly, “Look, I’m going to get out of here. Out of Ogunquit. If I stay much longer, I really will go crazy. Fran, why don’t you come with me?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Not yet.”

“Well, if you think of a place, come ask me again.”

Harold brightened. “All right, I will. It… you see, it’s a matter of…” He trailed off and began to walk down the porch steps in a kind of daze. His new cowboy boots gleamed in the sun. Fran watched him with sad amusement.

He waved just before climbing behind the wheel of the Caddy. Fran lifted a hand in return. The car jerked unprofessionally when he put it in reverse, and then he was backing down the driveway in fits and starts. He wandered to the left, crushing some of Carla’s flowers under the offside wheels, and nearly thumped into the culvert ditch as he turned out onto the road. Then he honked twice and was gone. Fran watched until he was out of sight, and then went back to her father’s garden.

Sometime after four o’clock she went back upstairs with dragging footsteps, forcing herself along. There was a dull headache in her temples and forehead, caused by heat and exertion and tension. She had told herself to wait another day, but that would only make it worse. Under her arm she carried her mother’s best damask tablecloth, the one kept strictly for company.

It did not go as well as she had hoped, but it was also nowhere near as bad as she had feared. There were flies on his face, lighting, rubbing their hairy little forelegs together and then taking off again, and his skin had gone a dusky dark shade, but he was so tanned from working in the garden that it was hardly noticeable… if you made your mind up not to notice it, that was. There was no smell, and that was what she had been most afraid of.

The bed he had died in was the double he had shared for years with Carla. She laid the tablecloth out on her mother’s half, so that its hem touched her father’s arm, hip, and leg. Then, swallowing hard (her head was pounding worse than ever), she prepared to roll her father onto his shroud.

Peter Goldsmith was wearing his striped pajamas, and that struck her as jarringly frivolous, but they would have to do. She could not even entertain the thought of first undressing and then dressing him again.

Steeling herself, she grasped his left arm—it was as hard and unyielding as a piece of furniture—and pushed, rolling him over. As she did so, a hideous long burping sound escaped him, a belch that seemed to go on and on, rasping in his throat as if a locust had crawled down there and had now come to life in the dark channel, calling and calling.

She screeched, stumbling away and knocking over the bedtable. His combs, his brushes, the alarm clock, a little pile of change and some tieclips and cufflinks all jingled and fell to the floor. Now there was a smell, a corrupted, gassy smell, and the last of the protective fog which had wrapped her dissipated and she knew the truth. She fell to her knees and wrapped her arms around her head and wailed. She was not burying some life-sized doll; it was her father she was burying, and the last of his humanity, the very last, was the juicy, gassy smell that now hung on the air. And it would be gone soon enough.

The world went gray and the sound of her own grief, braying and constant, began to seem distant, as if someone else was uttering those sounds, perhaps one of the little brown women you see on the TV newsclips. Some length of time went by, she had no idea how long, and then, little by little, she came back to herself and to the knowledge of all that still remained to be done. They were the things she could not have brought herself to do before.

She went to him and turned him over. He uttered another belch, this one small and dwindling. She kissed his forehead.

“I love you, Daddy,” she said. “I love you, Frannie loves you.” Her tears fell on his face and gleamed there. She removed his pajamas and dressed him in his best suit, hardly noticing the dull throb in her back, the ache in her neck and arms as she lifted each part of his weight, dressed it, dropped it, and went on to the next part. She propped his head up with two volumes of The Book of Knowledge to get his tie right. In his bottom drawer, under the socks, she found his army medals—Purple Heart, good conduct medals, campaign ribbons… and the Bronze Star he had won in Korea. She pinned them to his lapel. In the bathroom she found Johnson’s Baby Powder and powdered his face and neck and hands. The smell of the powder, sweet and nostalgic, brought the tears on again. Sweat slicked her body. There were pitted dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes.

She folded the tablecloth over him, got her mother’s sewing kit, and closed the seam. Then she doubled the seam and sewed again. With a sobbing, whistling grunt, she managed to get his body to the floor without dropping it. Then she rested, half-swooning. When she felt she could go on, she lifted the top half of the corpse, got it to the head of the stairs, and then, as carefully as she could, down to the first floor. She stopped again, her breath coming in quick, whining gasps. Her headache was sharp now, needling into her with quick hard bursts of pain.

She dragged the body down the hall, through the kitchen, and out onto the porch. Down the porch steps. Then she had to rest again. The golden light of early evening was on the land now. She gave way again and sat beside him, her head on her knees, rocking back and forth, weeping. Birds twittered. Eventually she was able to drag him into the garden.

At last it was done. By the time the last sods were back in place (she had fitted them together down on her knees, as if doing a jigsaw puzzle) it was a quarter of nine. She was filthy. Only the flesh around her eyes was white; that area had been washed clean by her tears. She was reeling with exhaustion. Her hair hung against her cheeks in matted strings.

“Please be at peace, Daddy,” she muttered. “Please.”

She dragged the spade back to her father’s workshop and slung it inside indifferently. She had to rest twice as she climbed the six steps to the back porch. She crossed the kitchen without turning on the lights and kicked off her low-topped sneakers as she entered the living room. She dropped to the couch and slept immediately.

In the dream she was climbing the stairs again, going to her father, to do her duty and see him decently under the ground. But when she entered the room the tablecloth was already over the body and her sense of grief and loss changed to something else… something like fear. She crossed the darkened room, not wanting to, suddenly wanting only to flee, but helpless to stop. The tablecloth glimmered in the shadows, ghostly, ghastly, and it came to her:

It wasn’t her father under there. And what was under there was not dead.

Something—someone—filled with dark life and hideous good cheer was under there, and it would be more than her life was worth to pull that tablecloth back, but she… couldn’t… stop her feet.

Her hand reached out, floated over the tablecloth—and snatched it back.

He was grinning, but she couldn’t see his face. A wave of frigid cold blasting up at her from that awful grin. No, she couldn’t see his face, but she could see the gift this terrible apparition had brought for her unborn baby: a twisted coathanger.

She fled, fled from the room, from the dream, coming up, surfacing briefly —

Surfacing briefly in the three o’clock darkness of the living room, her body floating on a foam of dread, the dream already tattering and unraveling, leaving behind it only a sense of doom like the rancid aftertaste of some rotten meal. She thought, in that moment of half-sleeping and half-waking: Him, it’s him, the Walkin Dude, the man with no face.

Then she slept again, this time dreamlessly, and when she woke the next morning she didn’t remember the dream at all. But when she thought of the baby in her belly, a feeling of fierce protectiveness swept over her all at once, a feeling that perplexed her and frightened her a little with its depth and strength.

Chapter 29

That same evening, as Larry Underwood slept with Rita Blakemoor and as Frannie Goldsmith slept alone, dreaming her peculiarly ominous dream, Stuart Redman was waiting for Elder. He had been waiting for three days—and this evening Elder did not disappoint him.

At just past noon on the twenty-fourth, Elder and two male nurses had come and taken away the television. The nurses had removed it while Elder stood by, holding his revolver (neatly wrapped in a Baggie) on Stu. But by then Stu hadn’t wanted or needed the TV—it was just putting out a lot of confused shit anyway. All he had to do was stand at his barred window and look out at the town on the river below. Like the man on the record said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Smoke was no longer billowing from the stacks of the textile mill. The gaudy stripes and eddies of dye in the river had dissipated and the water ran clear and clean again. Most of the cars, glittering and toylike from this distance, had left the mill’s parking lot and hadn’t come back. By yesterday, the twenty-sixth, there had been only a few cars still moving on the turnpike, and those few had to weave between the stalls like skiers in a slalom race. No wreckers had come to remove the abandoned vehicles.

The downtown area was spread out below him like a relief map, and it seemed totally deserted. The town clock, which had chimed off the hours of his imprisonment here, had not tolled since nine this morning, when the little tune that preceded the striking had sounded draggy and weird, like a tune played underwater by a drowned music box. There had been a fire at what looked like a roadside café or maybe a general store just outside of town. It had burned merry hell all this afternoon, black smoke etched against the blue sky, but no fire engines had come to put it out. If the building hadn’t been set in the middle of an asphalt parking lot, Stu supposed that half the town might have gone up. Tonight the ruins were still smoldering in spite of an afternoon spat of rain.

Stu supposed that Elder’s final orders were to kill him—why not? He would only be one more corpse, and he knew their little secret. They had been unable to find a cure or to discover how his bodily makeup varied from all those who had succumbed. The thought that there would be precious few left he could tell their secret to had probably never even entered their computations. He was a loose thread held hostage by a bunch of tight assholes.

Stu was sure that a hero in a television program or a novel could have thought of a way to escape, hell, even some people in real life, but he wasn’t one of them. In the end he had decided with a certain panicky resignation that the only thing to do would be to wait for Elder and just try to be ready.

Elder was the clearest sign that this installation had been breached by what the help sometimes called “Blue” and sometimes the “superflu.” The nurses called him Dr. Elder, but he was no doctor. He was in his mid-fifties, hard-eyed and humorless. None of the doctors before Elder had felt a need to hold a gun on him. Elder scared Stu because there would be no reasoning or pleading with such a man. Elder was waiting for orders. When they came, he would carry them out. He was a spear-carrier, the army version of a Mafia button-man, and it would never occur to him to question his orders in the light of ongoing events.

Three years ago Stu had gotten a book called Watership Down to send to a nephew of his in Waco. He had gotten out a box to put the book in, and then, because he hated to wrap presents even more than he hated to read, he had thumbed to the first page, thinking he would scan a little of it to see what it was about. He read that first page, then the second… and then he was enthralled. He had stayed up all night, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and plowing steadily along, the way a man does when he’s not much used to reading just for the pleasure of it. The thing turned out to be about rabbits, for Christ’s sake. The stupidest, most cowardly animals of God’s earth… except the guy who wrote that book made them seem different. You really cared about them. It was a pretty damn good story, and Stu, who read at a snail’s pace, finished it two days later.

The thing he remembered most from that book was a phrase: “going tharn,” or just “tharn.” He understood it at once, because he had seen plenty of tharn animals, and run down a few on the highway. An animal which had gone tharn would crouch in the middle of the road, its ears flattened, watching as a car rushed toward it, unable to move from the certain oncoming death. A deer could be driven tharn simply by shining a flashlight in its eyes. Loud music would do it to a raccoon, and constant tapping on its cage would do it to a parrot.

Elder made Stu feel like that. He would look into Elder’s flat blue eyes and feel all the will drain out of him. Elder probably wouldn’t even need the pistol to dispose of him. Elder probably had had courses in karate, savate, and general dirty tricks. What could he possibly do against a man like that? Just thinking about Elder made his will to even try to want to drain away. Tharn. It was a good word for a bad state of mind.

The red light went on over the door at just past 10 P.M., and Stu felt light perspiration break on his arms and face. It was this way every time the red light went on, because one of these times Elder would be alone. He would be alone because he wouldn’t want witnesses. There would be a furnace somewhere to cremate plague victims. Elder would bundle him into it. Snip. No more loose ends.

Elder stepped through the door. Alone.

Stu was sitting on his hospital bed, one hand resting on the back of his chair. At the sight of Elder he felt the familiar sickening drop in his belly. He felt the familiar urge to spill out a flood of loose, pleading words, in spite of his knowledge that such pleas would avail him nothing. There was no mercy in the face behind the white-suit’s transparent visor.

Now everything seemed very clear to him, very colorful, very slow. He could almost hear his eyes rolling in their bed of lubrication as he followed Elder’s progress into the room. He was a big man, stocky, and his white-suit was stretched too tight over him. The hole at the end of the pistol he held looked tunnel-size.

“How are you feeling?” Elder asked, and even through the tinny speaker Stu could hear the nasal quality of Elder’s voice. Elder was sick.

“Just the same,” Stu said, surprised at the evenness of his voice. “Say, when do I get out of here?”

“Very soon now,” Elder said. He was pointing the gun in Stu’s general direction, not precisely at him, but not precisely away, either. He uttered a muffled sneeze. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

Stu shrugged.

“I like that in a man,” Elder said. “Your big talkers, they’re your whimperers and whiners and belly-achers. I just got the word on you about twenty minutes ago, Mr. Redman. They’re not such hot orders, but I think you’ll do okay.”

“What orders?”

“Well, I’ve been ordered to—”

Stu’s eyes flicked past Elder’s shoulder, toward the high, riveted sill of the airlock door. “Christ Jesus!” he exclaimed. “That’s a fucking rat, what kind of place are you running with rats in it?”

Elder turned, and for a moment Stu was almost too surprised by the unexpected success of his ruse to go on. Then he slid off the bed and grasped the back of his chair in both hands as Elder began to pivot toward him again. Elder’s eyes were wide and suddenly alarmed. Stu lifted the chair over his head and stepped forward, swinging it down, getting every ounce of his one-eighty behind it.

“Get back there!” Elder cried. “Don’t—”

The chair crashed down on his right arm. The gun went off, disintegrating the Baggie, and the bullet screamed off the floor. Then the gun fell to the carpet, where it discharged again.

Stu was afraid he could count on only one more blow with the chair before Elder fully recovered himself. He determined to make it a good one. He brought it around in a high hard arc, a Henry Aaron home run swing. Elder tried to get his broken right arm up and couldn’t. The legs of the chair crashed into the hood of the white-suit. The plastic faceplate splintered in Elder’s eyes and nose. He screamed and fell backward.

He rolled onto all fours and scrambled for the gun lying on the carpet. Stu swung the chair one last time, bringing it down on the back of Elder’s head. Elder collapsed. Panting, Stu reached down and grabbed the gun. He stepped away, pointing it at the prone body, but Elder didn’t move.

For a moment a nightmarish thought tormented him: What if Elder’s orders had not been to kill him but to release him? But that made no sense, did it? If his orders had been to release him, why the talk about no whimpering and whining? Why would he have termed the orders “not so hot”?

No—Elder had been sent here to kill him.

Stu looked at the prone body, trembling all over. If Elder got up now, Stu thought he would probably miss him with all five bullets at point-blank range. But he didn’t think Elder was going to get up. Not now, not ever.

Suddenly the need to get out of there was so strong that he almost bolted blindly through the airlock door and into whatever lay beyond. He had been locked up for over a week, and all he wanted now was to breathe fresh air and then get far, far away from this terrible place.

But it had to be done carefully.

Stu walked to the airlock, stepped in, and pushed a button marked CYCLE. An air-pump went on, ran briefly, and the outer door opened. Beyond it was a small room furnished only with a desk. On it was a thin stack of medical charts… and his clothes. The ones he had been wearing on the airplane from Braintree to Atlanta. The cold finger of dread touched him again. Those things would have gone into the crematorium with him, no doubt. His charts, his clothes. So long, Stuart Redman. Stuart Redman would have become an unperson. In fact—

There was a slight noise behind him and Stu turned around fast. Elder was staggering toward him, crouched over, his hands swinging loosely. A jagged splinter of plastic was lodged in one oozing eye. Elder was smiling.

“Don’t move,” Stu said. He pointed the gun, steadying it with both hands—and still the barrel jittered.

Elder gave no sign that he had heard. He kept coming.

Wincing, Stu pulled the trigger. The pistol bucked in his hands and Elder stopped. The smile had turned into a grimace, as if he had been struck with a sudden gas pain. There was now a small hole in the breast of his white-suit. For a moment he stood, swaying, and then he crashed forward. For a moment Stu could only stare at him, frozen, and then he blundered into the room where his personal effects were piled on the desk.

He tried the door at the far end of the office, and it opened. Beyond the door was a hallway lit by muted fluorescents. Halfway down to the elevator bank, an abandoned gurney cart stood by what was probably the nurses’ station. He could hear faint groaning. Someone was coughing, a harsh, ratcheting sound that seemed to have no end.

He went back into the room, gathered his clothes up, and put them under one arm. Then he went out, closed the door behind him, and started down the hall. His hand was sweating against the grip of Elder’s gun. When he reached the gurney he looked behind him, unnerved by the silence and the emptiness. The cougher had stopped. Stu kept expecting to see Elder—creeping or crawling after him, intent on carrying out his final directive. He found himself longing for the closed and known dimensions of his room.

The groaning began again, louder this time. At the elevators another corridor ran at right angles to this one, and leaning against the wall was a man Stu recognized as one of his nurses. His face was swelled and blackened, his chest rising and falling in quick spurts. As Stu looked at him, he began to groan again. Behind him, curled in a fetal position, was a dead man. Farther down the hall there were another three bodies, one of them female. The male nurse—Vic, Stu remembered, his name is Vic—began to cough again.

“Jesus,” Vic said. “Jesus, what are you doing out? You’re not supposed to be out.”

“Elder came to take care of me and I took care of him instead,” Stu said. “I was lucky he was sick.”

“Sweet bleeding Jesus, you better believe you was lucky,” Vic said, and another coughing fit, this one weaker, tore loose from his chest. “That hurts, man, you wouldn’t believe how that hurts. What a fuckup this turned out to be. Bleeding Christ.”

“Listen, can I do anything for you?” Stu asked awkwardly.

“If you’re serious, you can put that gun in my ear and pull the trigger. I’m ripping myself to pieces inside.” He began to cough again, and then to groan helplessly.

But Stu couldn’t do that, and as Vic’s hollow groans continued, Stu’s nerve broke. He ran for the elevators, away from the blackish face like the moon in partial eclipse, half expecting Vic to call after him in that strident and helplessly righteous voice that the sick always seem to use when they need something from the well. But Vic only went on groaning and that was somehow worse.

The elevator door had shut and the car was already moving downward when it occurred to Stu that it might be booby-trapped. That would be just their speed. Poison gas, maybe, or a cutout circuit that would disengage the cables and send the elevator careering down the shaft to crash at the bottom. He stepped into the middle of the car and looked around nervously for hidden vents or loopholes. Claustrophobia caressed him with a rubber hand and suddenly the elevator seemed no more than telephone-booth-size, then coffin-size. Premature burial, anyone?

He reached out a finger to push the STOP button, and then wondered what good that would do if he was between floors. Before he could answer the question, the elevator slid to a smooth, normal stop.

What if there are men with guns out there?

But the only sentinel when the door slid back was a dead woman in a nurse’s uniform. She was curled up in a fetal position by a door marked LADIES.

Stu stared at her so long that the door began to slide shut again. He put his arm out and the door bounced obediently back. He stepped out. The hallway led down to a T-junction and he walked toward it, giving the dead nurse a wide berth.

There was a noise behind him and he whirled, bringing the gun up, but it was only the elevator door sliding shut for the second time. He looked at it for a moment, swallowed hard, then walked on. The rubber hand was back, playing tunes on the base of his spine, telling him to hell with this walk-don’t-run bit, let’s get out quick before someone… something … can get us. The echoes of his footfalls in this semidark corridor of the administration wing were too much like macabre company—Coming to play, Stuart? Very good. Doors with frosted glass panels marched past him, each with its own tale to tell: DR. SLOANE. RECORDS AND TRANSCRIPTS. MR. BALLINGER. MICROFILM. COPYFILE. MRS. WIGGS. Perhaps of the cabbage patch, Stu thought.

There was a drinking fountain at the T-junction, but the warm, chlorinated taste of the water made his stomach turn. There was no exit to his left; a sign on the tile wall with an orange arrow beneath read LIBRARY WING. The corridor seemed to stretch away for miles that way. Some fifty yards down was the body of a man in a white-suit, like some strange animal cast up on a sterile beach.

His control was getting bad. This place was much, much bigger than he had first assumed. Not that he’d had a right to assume much of anything from what he’d seen when he was admitted—which had been two halls, one elevator, and one room. Now he guessed it to be the size of a largish metropolitan hospital. He could stumble around in here for hours, his footfalls echoing and rebounding, coming across a corpse every now and then. They were strewn about like prizes in some ghastly treasure hunt. He remembered taking Norma, his wife, to a big hospital in Houston when they diagnosed the cancer. Everyplace you went in there they had little maps on the walls with little arrows pointing at a dot. The words written on each arrow said: YOU ARE HERE. They put those up so people wouldn’t get lost. Like he was now. Lost. Oh baby, this was bad. This was so bad.

“Don’t go tharn now, you’re almost home free,” he said, and his words echoed back, flat and strange. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud, and that made it worse.

He turned to the right, setting his back to the library wing, walked past more offices, came to another corridor, and turned down that. He began to look behind himself frequently, assuring himself that no one—Elder, maybe—was following him, but unable to believe it. The hallway ended in a closed door that said RADIOLOGY. A hand-lettered sign hung on the knob: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE RANDALL.

Stu went back and peered around the corner and back where he had come from. The dead body in the white-suit was tiny with distance now, hardly more than a speck, but seeing it there so changeless and eternal made him want to run away as fast as he could.

He turned right, setting his back to it again. Twenty yards farther up, the corridor branched into another T-junction. Stu turned right and went past more offices. The corridor ended at the microbiology lab. In one of the lab carrels a young man clad in jockey shorts lay sprawled over his desk. He was comatose, bleeding from the nose and mouth. His breath rattled in and out with a sound like October wind in dead cornhusks.

And then Stu did begin to run, turning from one corridor to another, becoming more and more convinced that there was no way out, at least not from this level. The echo of his footfalls chased him, as if either Elder or Vic had lived just long enough to put a squad of ghostly MPs on his trail. Then another fancy crowded that out, one he somehow associated with the queer dreams he had been having the last few nights. The idea grew so strong that he became afraid to turn around, afraid that if he did he would see a white-suited figure striding after him, a white-suited figure with no face but only blackness behind a Plexiglas plate. Some dreadful apparition, a hit-man from beyond sane time and space.

Panting, Stu rounded a corner, sprinted ten feet before he realized the corridor was a dead end, and crashed into a door with a sign over it. The sign read EXIT.

He pushed at the bar, convinced it would not move, but it did, and the door opened easily. He went down four steps to another door. To the left of this landing, more stairs went down into thick darkness. The top half of this second door was clear glass reinforced with crisscrossed safety wire. Beyond it was only the night, the beautiful mellow summer night, and all the freedom a man ever dreamed of.

Stu was still staring out, transfixed, when the hand slipped out of the darkness of the stairwell and grasped his ankle. A gasp tore at Stu’s throat like a thorn. He looked around, his belly a freezing floe of ice, and beheld a bloody, grinning face upturned in the darkness.

“Come down and eat chicken with me, beautiful,” it whispered in a cracked and dying voice. “It’s soooo dark—”

Stu screamed and tried to pull free. The grinning thing from the darkness held on, talking and grinning and chuckling. Blood or bile was trickling from the corners of its mouth. Stu kicked at the hand holding his ankle, then stomped it. The face hanging in the darkness of the stairwell disappeared. There was a series of thudding crashes… and then the screams began. Of pain or of rage, Stu could not tell. He didn’t care. He battered against the outside door with his shoulder. It banged open and he tottered out, whirling his arms to keep his balance. He lost it anyway and fell down on the cement path.

He sat up slowly, almost warily. Behind him, the screams had stopped. A cool evening breeze touched his face, dried the sweat on his brow. He saw with something very like wonder that there was grass, and flowerbeds. Night had never smelled as fragrantly sweet as this. A crescent moon rode the sky. Stu turned his face up to it thankfully, and then walked across the lawn toward the road which led to the town of Stovington below. The grass was dressed with dewfall. He could hear wind whispering in the pines.

“I’m alive,” Stu Redman said to the night. He began to cry. “I’m alive, thank God I’m alive, thank You, God, thank You, God, thank You—”

Tottering a little, he began to walk down the road.

Chapter 30

Dust blew straight across the Texas scrubland, and at twilight it created a translucent curtain that made the town of Arnette seem like a sepia ghost-image. Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco sign had blown down and lay in the middle of the road. Someone had left the gas on in Norm Bruett’s house, and the day before, a spark from the air conditioner had blown the whole place sky-high, rattling lumber and shingles and Fisher-Price toys all over Laurel Street. On Main Street, dogs and soldiers lay dead together in the gutter. In Randy’s Sooperette a man in pj’s lay draped over the meat counter, his arms hanging down. One of the dogs now lying in the gutter had been at this man’s face before losing its appetite. Cats did not catch the flu, and dozens of them wove in and out of the twilit stillness like smoky shades. From several houses the sound of television snow ran on and on. A random shutter banged back and forth. A red wagon, old and faded and rusty, the words SPEEDAWAY EXPRESS barely legible on its sides, stood in the middle of Durgin Street in front of the Indian Head Tavern. There were a number of returnable beer and soda bottles in the wagon. On Logan Lane, in Arnette’s best neighborhood, wind chimes played on the porch of Tony Leominster’s house. Tony’s Scout stood in the driveway, its windows open. A family of squirrels had nested in the back seat. The sun deserted Arnette; the town grew dark under the wing of the night. The town was, except for the chirr and whisper of small animals and the tinkle of Tony Leominster’s wind chimes, silent. And silent. And silent.

Chapter 31

Christopher Bradenton struggled out of delirium like a man struggling out of quicksand. He ached all over. His face felt alien, as if someone had injected it with silicone in a dozen places and it was now the size of a blimp. His throat was raw pain, and more frightening, the opening there seemed to have closed from ordinary throat-size to something no larger than the bore of a boy’s air pistol. His breath whistled in and out through this horribly tiny connection he needed to maintain contact with the world. Still it wasn’t enough, and worse than the steady, throbbing soreness there was a feeling like drowning. Worst of all, he was hot. He could not remember ever having been this hot, not even two years ago when he had been driving two political prisoners who had jumped bail in Texas west to Los Angeles. Their ancient Pontiac Tempest had died on Route 190 in Death Valley and he had been hot then, but this was worse. This was an inside hot, as if he had swallowed the sun.

He moaned and tried to kick the covers off, but he had no strength. Had he put himself to bed? He didn’t think so. Someone or something had been in the house with him. Someone or something… he should remember, but he couldn’t. All Bradenton could remember was that he had been afraid even before he got sick, because he knew someone (or something) was coming and he would have to… what?

He moaned again and rocked his head from side to side on the pillow. Delirium was all he remembered. Hot phantoms with sticky eyes. His mother had come into this plain log bedroom, his mother who had died in 1969, and she had talked to him: “Kit, oh Kit, I tole you, ‘Don’t get mixed up with those people,’ I said. ‘I don’t care nothing about politics,’ I said, ‘but those men you hang around with are crazy as mad dogs and those girls are nothing but hoors.’ I tole you, Kit…” And then her face had broken apart, letting through a horde of grave beetles from the splitting yellow parchment fissures and he had screamed until blackness wavered and there was confused shouting, the slap of shoe-leather as people ran… lights, flashing lights, the smell of gas, and he was back in Chicago, the year was 1968, somewhere voices were chanting The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world… and there was a girl lying in the gutter by the entrance to the park, her body clad in overall jeans, her feet bare, her long hair full of glass-fragments, her face a glittering mask of blood that was black in the heartless white glow of the streetlights, the mask of a crushed insect. He helped her to her feet and she screamed and shrank against him because an outer-space monster was advancing out of the drifting gas, a creature clad in shining black boots and a flak-jacket and a walleyed gas mask, holding a truncheon in one hand, a can of Mace in the other, and grinning. And when the outer-space monster pushed its mask back, revealing its grinning, flaming face, they had both screamed because it was the somebody or something he had been waiting for, the man Kit Bradenton had always been terrified of. It had been the Walkin Dude. Bradenton’s screams had shattered the fabric of that dream like high C shatters fine crystal and he was in Boulder, Colorado, an apartment on Canyon Boulevard, summer and hot, so hot that even in your skivvy shorts your body was trickling sweat, and across from you stands the most beautiful boy in the world, tall and tanned and straight, he is wearing lemon-yellow bikini briefs which cling lovingly to every ridge and hollow of his precious buttocks and you know if he turns his face will be like a Raphael angel and he will be hung like the Lone Ranger’s horse. Hiyo Silver, away. Where did you pick him up? A meeting to discuss racism on the CU campus, or in the cafeteria? Hitchhiking? Does it matter? Oh, it’s so hot, but there’s water, a pitcher of water, an urn of water carved with strange figures which stand out in bas-relief, and beside it the pill, no—! THE PILL! The one that will send him off to what this angel in the light yellow briefs calls Huxleyland, the place where the moving finger writes and doesn’t move on, the place where flowers grow on dead oak trees, and boy, what an erection is tenting out your skivvies! Has Kit Bradenton ever been so horny, so ready for love? “Come to bed,” you say to that smooth brown back, “come to bed and do me and then I’ll do you. Just the way you like.” “Take your pill first,” he says without turning. “Then we’ll see.” You take the pill, the water is cool in your throat, and little by little the strangeness comes over your sight, the weirdness that makes every angle in the place a little more or a little less than ninety degrees. For some time you find yourself looking at the fan on the cheap Grand Rapids bureau and then you’re looking at your own reflection in the wavy looking glass above it. Your face looks black and swelled but you don’t let it worry you because it’s just the pill, only !!!THE PILL!! “Trips,” you murmur, “oh boy, Captain Trips and I am sooo horny…” He begins to run and at first you have to look at those smooth hips where the elastic of his briefs rides so low, and then your gaze moves up the flat, tanned belly, then to the beautiful hairless chest, and finally from the slimly corded neck to the face… and it is his face, sunken and happy and ferociously grinning, not the face of a Raphael angel but of a Goya devil and from each blank eyesocket there peers the reptilian face of an adder; he is coming toward you as you scream, he is whispering: Trips, baby, Captain Trips…

Then murkiness, faces and voices that he didn’t remember, and at last he had surfaced here, in the small house he had built with his own hands on the outskirts of Mountain City. Because now was now, and the great wave of revolt which had engulfed the country had long since withdrawn, the young Turks were now mostly old lags with gray in their beards and big coke-burned holes where their septa used to be, and this was the wreckage, baby. The boy in the yellow briefs had been long ago, and in Boulder Kit Bradenton had been little more than a boy himself.

My God, am I dying?

He beat at the thought with agonized horror, the heat rolling and billowing in his head like a sandstorm. And suddenly his short, quick respiration stopped as a sound began to rise from somewhere beyond and below the closed bedroom door.

At first Bradenton thought it was a fire-siren, or a police-car siren. It rose and grew louder as it grew closer; beneath it he could hear the jagged pounding of footfalls clocking along his downstairs hall and then through his living room and then battering up the stairs in a Goth’s stampede.

He pushed himself back against his pillow, his face drawing down in a rictus of terror even as his eyes widened to circles in his puffy, blackish face and the sound neared. Not a siren any more but a scream, high and ululating, a scream that no human throat could make or sustain, surely the scream of a banshee or of some black Charon, come to take him across the river that separates the land of the living from that of the dead.

Now the running footsteps clattered straight toward him along the upstairs hall, boards groaning and creaking and protesting under the weight of those merciless rundown bootheels and suddenly Kit Bradenton knew who it was and he shrieked as the door burst inward and the man in the faded jeans jacket ran in, his murderer’s grin flashing on his face like a whirring white circle of knives, his face as jolly as that of a lunatic Santa Claus, carrying a galvanized steel bucket high over his right shoulder.

“HEEEEEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWW! ”

“No!” Bradenton screamed, crossing his arms weakly across his face. “No! Noo—! ”

The bucket tipped forward and the water flew out, all of it seeming to hang suspended for a moment in the yellow lamplight like the largest uncut diamond in the universe, and he saw the dark man’s face through it, reflected and refracted into the face of a supremely grinning troll who had just made its way up from hell’s darkest shit-impacted bowels to rampage on the earth; then the water fell on him, so cold that his swelled throat sprang momentarily open again, squeezing blood from its walls in big beads, shocking breath into him and making him kick the covers all the way over the foot of the bed in one convulsive spasm so that his body would be free to jackknife and sunfish as bitter cramps from these involuntary struggles whipped through him like greyhounds biting on the run.

He screamed. He screamed again. Then lay trembling, his feverish body soaked from toe to crown, his head thumping, his eyes bulging. His throat closed to a raw slit and he began to struggle for breath miserably again. His body began to shake and shiver.

“I knew that’d cool you off!” the man he knew as Richard Fry cried cheerily. He set the bucket down with a clang. “Ah say, Ah say Ah knew dat wuz goan do de trick, Kingfish! Thanks are in order, my good man, thanks from you tendered to me. Do you thank me? Can’t talk? No? Yet in your heart I know you do.”

“Yeee-GAAAHHH! ”

He sprang into the air like Bruce Lee in a Run Run Shaw kung-fu epic, knees spread, for a moment seeming to hang suspended directly over Kit Bradenton as the water had done, his shadow a blob on the chest of Bradenton’s soaked pajamas, and Bradenton screamed weakly. Then one knee came down on either side of his ribcage and Richard Fry’s bluejeaned groin was the crotch of a fork suspended above his chest by inches, and his face burned down at Bradenton’s like a cellar torch in a gothic novel.

“Had to wake you up, man,” Fry said. “I didn’t want you to boogie off without a chance for us to talk a bit.”

“… off… off… off me…”

“I’m not on you, man, come on. I’m just hanging suspended above you. Like the great invisible world.”

Bradenton, in an agony of fear, could only pant and shake and roll his trapped eyeballs away from that jolly, fuming face.

“We got to talk about ships and seals and sailing wax, and whether bees have stings. Also about the papers you’re supposed to have for me, and the car, and the keys to the car. Now all I see in your gay-radge is a Chevy pickup, and I know that’s yours, Kitty-Kitty, so how bout it?”

“… they… papers… can’t… can’t talk…” He gasped harshly for air. His teeth chittered together like small birds in a tree.

“You better be able to talk,” Fry said, and stuck out his thumbs. They were both double-jointed (as were all his fingers), and he wiggled them back and forth at angles that seemed to deny biology and physics. “Cause if you aren’t, I’m going to have your baby blues for my keychain and you’re going to have to trot around hell with a seeing-eye dog.” He jammed his thumbs at Bradenton’s eyes and Bradenton jerked back against the pillow helplessly.

“You tell me,” Fry said, “and I’ll leave you the right pills. In fact, I’ll hold you up so you can swallow them. Make you well, man. Pills to take care of everything.”

Bradenton, now trembling with fear as much as with cold, forced the words out through his clacking teeth. “Papers… in the name of Randall Flagg. Welsh dresser downstairs. Under the… contact paper.”

“Car?”

Bradenton tried desperately to think. Had he gotten this man a car? It was so far away, all the flames of delirium were in between, and the delirium seemed to have done something to his thought processes, burned out whole banks of memory. Whole sections of his past were scorched cabinets filled with smoldering wires and blackened relays. Instead of the car this awful man wanted to know about, an image of the first car he’d ever owned drifted up, a 1953 Studebaker with a bullet nose that he had painted pink.

Gently, Fry put one hand over Bradenton’s mouth and pinched his nostrils shut with the other. Bradenton began to buck beneath him. Furry moans escaped around Fry’s hand. Fry took both hands away and said, “Does that help you remember?”

Strangely, it did.

“Car…” he said, and then panted like a dog. The world swirled, steadied, and he was able to go on. “Car’s parked… behind the Conoco station… just outside of town. Route 51.”

“North or south of town?”

“Suh… suh…”

“Yes suh! I got it. Go on.”

“Covered with a tarp. Byoo… Byoo… Buick. Registration’s on the steering post. Made out… Randall Flagg.” He collapsed into panting again, unable to say more or do anything except look at Fry with dumb hope.

“Keys?”

“Floormat. Under…”

Fry’s backside cut off any further words by settling on Bradenton’s chest. He settled there the way he might have settled on a comfortable hassock in a friend’s apartment and suddenly Bradenton couldn’t even get a small breath.

He expelled the last of his tidal breath on a single word: “…please…”

“And thank you,” Richard Fry/Randall Flagg said with a prim grin. “Say goodnight, Kit.”

Unable to speak, Kit Bradenton could only roll his eyes whitely in their puffed sockets.

“Don’t think unkindly of me,” the dark man said softly, looking down at him. “It’s just that we have to hurry now. The carnival is opening early. They’re opening all the rides, and the Pitch-til-U-Win, and the Wheel of Fortune. And it’s my lucky night, Kit. I feel that. I feel that very strongly. So we have to hurry.”

It was a mile and a half to the Conoco station, and by the time he got there it was quarter past three in the morning. The wind had picked up, whining along the street, and on his way here he had seen the corpses of three dead dogs and one dead man. The man had been wearing some sort of uniform. Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe.

The tarp which covered the Buick had been pegged tautly to the ground, and the wind made the canvas flap. When Flagg pulled the pegs the tarpaulin went cartwheeling off into the night like a large brown ghost, moving east. The question was, in which direction was he heading?

He stood beside the Buick, which was a well-preserved 1975 model (cars did well out here: there was little moisture and rust had a hard time starting), scenting the summer night sir like a coyote. There was desert perfume on it, the kind you can only smell clearly at night. The Buick stood whole in an automobile mortuary of dismembered parts, Easter Island monoliths in the windy silence. An engine block. An axle looking like some muscle-boy’s dumbbell. A pile of tires for the wind to make hooting sound effects in. A cracked windshield. More.

He thought best in scenes like these. In scenes like these, any man could be Iago.

He walked past the Buick and ran his hand across the dented hood of what might once have been a Mustang. “Hey, little Cobra, don’t ya know ya gonna shut em down…” he sang softly. He kicked over a stove-in radiator with one dusty boot and disclosed a nest of jewels, winking back at him with dim fire. Rubies, emeralds, pearls the size of goose eggs, diamonds to rival the stars. Snapped his finger at them. They were gone. Where was he to go?

The wind moaned through the shattered wing window of an old Plymouth and tiny living things rustled inside.

Something else rustled behind him. He turned and it was Kit Bradenton, clad only in absurd yellow underpants, his poet’s pot hanging over the waistband like an avalanche held in suspended animation. Bradenton walked toward him over the heaped remains of Detroit rolling iron. A leafspring pierced through his foot like crucifixion, but the wound was bloodless. Bradenton’s navel was a black eye.

The dark man snapped his fingers and Bradenton was gone.

He grinned and walked back to the Buick. Laid his forehead against the slope of roof on the passenger’s side. Time passed. At some length he straightened, still grinning. He knew.

He slipped behind the wheel of the Buick, and pumped the gas a couple of times to prime up the carburetor. The motor purred into life and the needle on the gas gauge swung over to F. He pulled out and drove around the side of the gas station, his headlight beams for a moment catching another pair of emeralds, cat’s eyes glistening warily from the tall grass by the Conoco station’s Ladies Room door. In the cat’s mouth was the small limp body of a mouse. At the sight of his grinning, moonlike face peering down at it from the driver’s side window, the cat dropped its morsel and ran. Flagg laughed aloud, heartily, the laugh of a man with nothing on his mind but lots of good things. Where the Conoco’s tarmac became highway, he turned right and began to run south.

Chapter 32

Someone had left the door open between Maximum Security and the cellblock beyond it; the steel-walled length of corridor acted as a natural amplifier, blowing up the steady, monotonous hollering that had been going on all morning to monster size, making it echo and re-echo until Lloyd Henreid thought that, between the cries and the very natural fear that he felt, he would go utterly and completely bugshit.

“Mother,” the hoarse, echoing cry came. “Mootherr! ”

Lloyd was sitting crosslegged on the floor of his cell. Both of his hands were slimed with blood; he looked like a man who has drawn on a pair of red gloves. The light blue cotton shirt of his prison uniform was smeared with blood because he kept wiping his hands dry on it in order to get a better purchase. It was ten o’clock in the morning, June 29. Around seven this morning he had noticed that the front right leg of his bunk was loose, and since then he had been trying to unthread the bolts that held it to the floor and to the underside of the bedframe. He was trying to do this with only his fingers for tools, and he had actually gotten five of the six bolts. As a result his fingers now looked like a spongy mess of raw hamburger. The sixth bolt was the one that had turned out to be the bitch-kitty, but he was beginning to think he might actually get it. Beyond that, he hadn’t allowed himself to think. The only way to keep back brute panic was not to think.

“Mootherr —”

He leaped to his feet, drops of blood from his wounded, throbbing fingers splattering on the floor, and shoved his face out into the corridor as far as he could, eyes bulging furiously, hands gripping the bars.

“Shut up, cock-knocker! ” he screamed. “Shut up, ya drivin me fuckin batshit! ”

There was a long pause. Lloyd savored the silence as he had once savored a piping hot Quarter Pounder with Cheese from McD’s. Silence is golden, he had always thought that was a stupid saying, but it sure had its points.

“MOOOOTHERRRR —” The voice came drifting up at the steel throat of the holding cells again, as mournful as a foghorn.

“Jesus,” Lloyd muttered. “Holy Jesus. SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP, YA FUCKIN DIMWIT! ”

“MOOOOOOOTHERRRRRRRRRR —”

Lloyd turned back to the leg of his bunk and attacked it savagely, wishing again that there was something in the cell to pry with, trying to ignore the throbbing in his fingers and the panic in his mind. He tried to remember exactly when he had seen his lawyer last—things like that grew hazy very soon in Lloyd’s mind, which retained a chronology of past events about as well as a sieve retains water. Three days ago. Yes. The day after that prick Mathers had socked him in the balls. Two guards had taken him down to the conference room again and Shockley was still on the door and Shockley had greeted him: Why, here’s the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say? And then Shockley had opened his mouth and sneezed right into Lloyd’s face, spraying him with thick spit. There’s some cold germs for you, pusbag, everybody else has got one from the warden on down, and I believe in share the wealth. In America even scummy douchebags like you should be able to catch a cold. Then they had taken him in, and Devins had looked like a man who is trying to conceal some pretty good news lest it should turn out to be bad news, after all. The judge who was supposed to hear Lloyd’s case was flat on his back with the flu. Two other judges were also ill, either with the flu that was going around or with something else, so the remaining benchwarmers were swamped. Maybe they could get a postponement. Keep your fingers crossed, the lawyer had said. When would we know? Lloyd had asked. Probably not until the last minute, Devins had replied. I’ll let you know, don’t worry. But Lloyd hadn’t seen him since then and now, thinking, back on it, he remembered that the lawyer had had a runny nose himself and—

“OwwwoooJesus! ”

He slipped the fingers of his right hand into his mouth and tasted blood. But that frigging bolt had given a little bit, and that meant he was going to get it for sure. Even the mother-shouter down there at the end of the hall could no longer bother him… at least not so badly. He was going to get it. After that he would just have to wait and see what happened. He sat with his fingers in his mouth, giving them a rest. When this was done, he’d rip his shirt into strips and bandage them.

“Mother? ”

“I know what you can do with your mother,” Lloyd muttered.

That night, after he had talked to Devins for the last time, they had begun taking sick prisoners out, carrying them out, not to put too fine a point on it, because they weren’t taking anyone that wasn’t already far gone. The man in the cell on Lloyd’s right, Trask, had pointed out that most of the guards sounded pretty snotty themselves. Maybe we can get something outta this, Trask said. What? Lloyd had asked. I dunno, Trask said. He was a skinny man with a long bloodhound face who was in Maximum Security while awaiting trial on charges of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Postponements, he said. I dunno.

Trask had six joints under the thin mattress of his bunk, and he gave four of them to one of the screws who still seemed okay to tell him what was going on outside. The guard said people were leaving Phoenix, bound for anyplace. There was a lot of sickness, and people were croaking faster than a horse could trot. The government said a vaccine was going to be available soon, but most people seemed to think that was crap. A lot of the radio stations from California were broadcasting really terrible things about martial law, army blockades, home-boys with automatic weapons on the rampage, and rumors of people dying by the tens of thousands. The guard said he wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the longhaired comsymp pervos had done it by putting something into the water.

The guard said he was feeling fine himself, but he was going to get the Christ out just as soon as his shift was over. He had heard the army was going to roadblock US 17 and I-10 and US 80 by tomorrow morning, and he was going to load up his wife and kid and all the food he could get his hands on and stay up in the mountains until it all blew over. He had a cabin up there, the guard said, and if anyone tried to get within thirty yards of it, he would put a bullet in his head.

The next morning Trask had a runny nose and said he felt feverish. He had been nearly gibbering with panic, Lloyd remembered as he sucked his fingers. Trask had yelled at every guard who passed to get him the fuck out before he got really sick or something. The guards never even looked at him, or at any of the other prisoners, who were now as restless as underfed lions in the zoo. That was when Lloyd started to feel scared. Usually there were as many as twenty different screws on the floor at any given time. So how come he had seen only four or five different faces on the other side of the bars?

That day, the twenty-seventh, Lloyd had begun eating only half of the meals that were thrust through the bars at him, and saving the other half—precious little—under his bunk mattress.

Yesterday Trask had gone into sudden convulsions. His face had turned as black as the ace of spades and he had died. Lloyd had looked longingly at Trask’s half-eaten lunch, but he had no way to reach it. Yesterday afternoon there had still been a few guards on the floor, but they weren’t carrying anyone down to the infirmary anymore, no matter how sick. Maybe they were dying down in the infirmary, too, and the warden decided to stop wasting the effort. No one came to remove Trask’s body.

Lloyd napped late yesterday afternoon. When he woke, the Maximum Security corridors were empty. No supper had been served. Now the place really did sound like the lion house at the zoo. Lloyd wasn’t imaginative enough to wonder how much more savage it would have sounded if Maximum Security had been filled to its capacity. He had no idea how many were still alive and lively enough to yell for their supper, but the echoes made it sound like more. All Lloyd knew for sure was that Trask was gathering flies on his right, and the cell on his left was empty. The former occupant, a young jive-talking black guy who had tried to mug an old lady and had killed her instead, had been taken to the infirmary days back. Across the way he could see two empty cells and the dangling feet of a man who was in for killing his wife and his brother-in-law during a penny Pokeno game. The Pokeno Killer, as he had been called, had apparently opted out with his belt, or if they had taken that, his own pair of pants.

Later that night, after the lights had come on automatically, Lloyd had eaten some of the beans he had saved from two days ago. They tasted horrible but he ate them anyway. He washed them down with water from the toilet bowl and then crawled up on his bunk and clasped his knees against his chest, cursing Poke for getting him into such a mess. It was all Poke’s fault. On his own, Lloyd never would have been ambitious to get into more than small-time trouble.

Little by little, the roaring for food had quieted down, and Lloyd suspected he wasn’t the only one who had been squirreling away some insurance. But he didn’t have much. If he had really believed this was going to happen, he would have put away more. There was something in the back of his mind that he didn’t want to see. It was as if there was a set of flapping drapes in the back of his mind, with something behind them. You could only see that thing’s bony, skeletal feet below the hem of the drapes. That’s all you wanted to see. Because the feet belonged to a nodding, emaciated corpse, and his name was STARVATION.

“Oh no,” Lloyd said. “Someone’s gonna come. Sure they are. Just as sure as shit sticks to a blanket.”

But he kept remembering the rabbit. He couldn’t help it. He had won the rabbit and a cage to keep him in at a school raffle. His daddy didn’t want him to keep it, but Lloyd had somehow persuaded him that he would take care of it and feed it out of his own allowance. He loved that rabbit, and he did take care of it. At first. The trouble was, things slipped his mind after a while. It had always been that way. And one day while he was swinging idly in the tire that hung from the sickly maple behind their scraggy little house in Marathon, Pennsylvania, he had suddenly sat bolt upright, thinking of that rabbit. He hadn’t thought of his rabbit in… well, in better than two weeks. It had just completely slipped his mind.

He ran to the little shed tacked onto the barn, and it had been summer just like it was now, and when he stepped into that shed, the bland smell of the rabbit had struck him in the face like a big old roundhouse slap. The fur he had liked so much to stroke was matted and dirty. White maggots crawled busily in the sockets that had once held his rabbit’s pretty pink eyes. The rabbit’s paws were ragged and bloody. He tried to tell himself that the paws were bloody because it had tried to scratch its way out of the cage, and that was undoubtedly how it had happened, but some sick, dark part of his mind spoke up in a whisper and said that maybe the rabbit, in the final extremity of its hunger, had tried to eat itself.

Lloyd had taken the rabbit away, dug a deep hole, and buried it, still in its cage. His father had never asked him about the rabbit, might even have forgotten that his boy had a rabbit—Lloyd was not terribly bright, but he was a mental giant when stacked up against his daddy—but Lloyd had never forgotten. Always plagued by vivid dreams, the death of the rabbit had occasioned a series of terrible nightmares. And now the vision of the rabbit returned as he sat on his bunk with his knees drawn up to his chest, telling himself that someone would come, someone would surely come and let him go free. He didn’t have this Captain Trips flu; he was just hungry. Like his rabbit had been hungry. Just like that.

Sometime after midnight he had fallen asleep, and this morning he had begun to work on the leg of his bunk. And now, looking at his bloody fingers, he thought with fresh horror about the paws of that long-ago rabbit, to whom he had meant no harm.

By one o’clock on the afternoon of June 29, he had the cotleg free. At the end the bolt had given with stupid ease and the leg had clanged to the floor of his cell and he had just looked at it, wondering what in God’s name he had wanted it for in the first place. It was about three feet long.

He took it to the front of the cell and began to hammer furiously against the blued-steel bars. “Hey!” he yelled, as the clanging bar gave off its deep, gonglike notes. “Hey, I want out! I want to get the fuck out of here, understand? Hey, goddammit, hey! ”

He stopped and listened as the echoes faded. For a moment there was total silence and then from the holding cellblock came the rapturous, hoarse answer: “Mother! Down here, Mother! I’m down here!”

“Jeeesus! ” Lloyd cried, and threw the cotleg into the corner. He had struggled for hours, practically destroyed his fingers, just so he could wake that asshole up.

He sat on his bunk, lifted the mattress, and took out a piece of rough bread. He debated adding a handful of dates, told himself he should save them, and snatched them up anyway. He ate them one by one, grimacing, saving the bread for last to take that slimy, fruity taste out of his mouth.

When he was done with this miserable excuse for a meal, he walked aimlessly to the right side of his cell. He looked down and stifled a cry of revulsion. Trask was sprawled half on his cot and half off it, and his pants legs had pulled up a little. His ankles were bare above the prison slippers they gave you to wear. A large, sleek rat was lunching up on Trask’s leg. Its repulsive pink tail was neatly coiled around its gray body.

Lloyd walked to the other corner of his own cell and picked up the cotleg. He went back and stood for a moment, wondering if the rat would see him and decide to go off where the company wasn’t quite so lively. But the rat’s back was to him, and as far as Lloyd could tell, the rat didn’t even know he was there. Lloyd measured the distance with his eye and decided the cotleg would reach admirably.

“Huh!” Lloyd grunted, and swung the leg. It squashed the rat against Trask’s leg, and Trask fell off his bunk with a stiff thump. The rat lay on its side, dazed, aspirating weakly. There were beads of blood in its whiskers. Its rear legs were moving, as if its ratty little brain was telling it to run somewhere but along the spinal cord the signals were getting all scrambled up. Lloyd hit it again and killed it.

“There you are, you cheap fuck,” Lloyd said. He put the cotleg down and wandered back to his bunk. He was hot and scared and felt like crying. He looked back over his shoulder and cried: “How do you like rat hell, you scuzzy little cocksucker?”

“Mother!” the voice cried happily in answer. “Moootherrr! ”

“Shut up! ” Lloyd screamed. “I ain’t your mother! Your mother’s in charge of blowjobs at a whorehouse in Asshole, Indiana! ”

“Mother?” the voice said, now full of weak doubt. Then it fell silent.

Lloyd began to weep. As he cried he rubbed his eyes with his fists like a small boy. He wanted a steak sandwich, he wanted to talk to his lawyer, he wanted to get out of here.

At last he lay down on his cot, put one arm over his eyes, and masturbated. It was as good a way of getting to sleep as any.

When he woke up again it was 5 P.M. and Maximum Security was dead quiet. Blearily, Lloyd got off his cot, which now leaned drunkenly toward the spot where one of its supports had been taken away. He got the cotleg, steeled himself for the cries of “Mother! ” and began hammering on the bars like a farm cook calling the hired hands in for a big country supper. Supper. Now there was a word, had there ever been a finer? Ham steaks and potatoes with redeye gravy and fresh new peas and milk with Hershey’s chocolate syrup to dump in it. And a great big old dish of strawberry ice cream for dessert. No, there had never been a word to match supper.

“Hey, ain’t nobody there?” Lloyd cried, his voice breaking.

No answer. Not even a cry of “Mother! ” At this point, he might have welcomed it. Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

Lloyd let the cotleg drop with a crash. He stumbled back to his bunk, turned up the mattress, and made inventory. Two more hunks of bread, two more handfuls of dates, a half-gnawed pork chop, one piece of bologna. He pulled the slice of bologna in two and ate the big half, but that only whetted his appetite, brought it raging up.

“No more,” he whispered, then gobbled the rest of the pork off the chopbone and called himself names and wept some more. He was going to die in here, just as his rabbit had died in its cage, just as Trask had died in his.

Trask.

He looked into Trask’s cell for a long, thoughtful time, watching the flies circle and land and take off. There was a regular L.A. International Airport for flies right on ole Trask’s face. At long last, Lloyd got the cotleg, went to the bars, and reached through with it. By standing on tiptoe he could get just enough length to catch the rat’s body and drag it toward his cell.

When it was close enough, Lloyd got on his knees and pulled the rat through to his side. He picked it up by the tail and held the dangling body before his eyes for a long time. Then he put it under his mattress where the flies could not get at it, segregating the limp body from what remained of his food-stash. He looked fixedly at the rat for a long time before letting the mattress fall back, mercifully hiding it from sight.

“Just in case,” Lloyd Henreid whispered to the silence. “Just in case, is all.”

Then he climbed up on the other end of the bunk, drew his knees up to his chin, and sat still.

Chapter 33

At twenty-two minutes of nine by the clock over the sheriff’s office doorway, the lights went off.

Nick Andros had been reading a paperback he had taken from the rack in the drugstore, a gothic novel about a frightened governess who thought the lonely estate where she was supposed to be teaching the handsome master’s sons was haunted. Although he wasn’t even halfway through the book, Nick already knew the ghost was really the handsome master’s wife, who was probably locked up in the attic, and crazy as a loon.

When the lights went out he felt his heart lurch in his chest and a voice whispered to him from deep in his mind, from the place where the nightmares which now haunted him every time he fell asleep lay in wait: He’s coming for you… he’s out there now, on the highways of the night… the highways in hiding… the dark man…

He dropped the paperback on the desk and went out into the street. The last of the daylight hadn’t gone out of the sky yet, but twilight was nearly over. All the streetlights were dark. The fluorescents in the drugstore, which had burned night and day, were also gone. The subdued thrum of the junction boxes atop the power poles was also gone; this was something Nick verified by putting his hand on one and feeling nothing but wood. The vibration, which was to him a kind of hearing, had ceased.

There were candles in the office supply cabinet, a whole box of them, but the thought of candles did not comfort Nick very much. The fact of the lights going out had hit him very hard and now he stood looking to the west, silently begging the light not to desert him and leave him in this dark graveyard.

But the light did go. Nick could no longer even pretend there was a little light left in the sky by ten past nine, and he went back to the office and fumbled his way to the cabinet where the candles were. He was feeling around on one of the shelves for the right box when the door behind him burst open and Ray Booth staggered inside, his face black and puffy, his LSU ring still glistening on his finger. He had been laid up in the woods close to town ever since the night of June twenty-second, a week ago. By the morning of the twenty-fourth he had been feeling sick, and at last, this evening, hunger and fear for his life had driven him down to town, where he had seen no one at all but the goddam mutie freak who had gotten him into this fix in the first place. The mutie had been crossing the town square just as big as Billy-be-damned, walking as if he owned the town where Ray had lived most of his life, the sheriff’s pistol holstered at his right hip and secured to his thigh with a gunslinger’s tie-down. Maybe he thought he did own the town. Ray suspected he was going to die of whatever had taken everyone else off, but first he was going to show the goddam freak that he didn’t own jack-shit.

Nick’s back was turned, and he had no idea he was no longer alone in Sheriff Baker’s office until the hands closed around his neck and locked there. The box he had just picked up fell out of his hands, wax candles breaking and rolling everywhere on the floor. He was half-strangled before he got over his first terror and he felt sudden certainty that the black creature from his dreams had come to life: some fiend from the basement of hell was behind him, and had wrapped its scaled claws around his neck as soon as the power had failed.

Then, convulsively, instinctively, he put his own hands over the hands that were throttling him and tried to pull them free. Hot breath blew against his right ear, making a windtunnel there which he could feel but not hear. He caught one clogged and rasping breath before the hands clamped tight again.

The two of them swayed in the black like dark dancers. Ray Booth could feel his strength ebbing as the kid struggled. His head was pounding. If he didn’t finish the mutie quick, he would never finish him at all. He throttled the scrawny kid’s neck with all the force left in his hands.

Nick felt the world going away. The pain in his throat, which had been sharp at first, was now numb and far off—almost pleasant. He stamped his booted heel down hard on one of Booth’s feet, and leaned his weight back against the big man at the same time. Booth was forced back a step, one of his feet came down on a candle. It rolled away under him and he crashed to the floor with Nick back-to on top of him. His hands were finally jarred loose.

Nick rolled away, breathing in harsh rasps. Everything seemed far off and floating, except for the pain in his throat, which had returned in slow, thudding bursts. He could taste slick blood in the back of his throat.

The large humped shape of whoever it was who had jumped him was lurching to its feet. Nick remembered the and clawed for it. It was there, but it wouldn’t come. It was stuck in the holster somehow. He pulled at it mightily now crazed with panic. It went off. The slug furrowed the side of his leg and embedded itself in the floor.

The shape fell on him like dead fate.

Nick’s breath exploded out of him, and then large white hands were groping at his face, the thumbs gouging at his eyes. Nick saw a purple gleam on one of those hands in the faint moonlight and his surprised mouth formed the word “Booth! ” in the darkness. His right hand continued to pull at the gun. He had barely felt the hot sizzle of pain along the length of his thigh.

One of Ray Booth’s thumbs jammed into Nick’s right eye. Exquisite pain flared and sparkled in his head. He jerked the gun free at last. Booth’s thumb, work-callused and hard, turned briskly clock and counterclock, grinding Nick’s eyeball.

Nick uttered an amorphous scream which was little more than a violent susurrus of air and jammed the gun into Booth’s flabby side. He pulled the trigger and the gun made a muffled whump! which Nick felt as a violent recoil that went nowhere but up his arm; the gunsight had snagged in Booth’s shirt. Nick saw a muzzle-flash, and a moment later smelled powder and Booth’s charring shirt. Ray Booth stiffened, then slumped on top of him.

Sobbing with pain and terror, Nick heaved against the weight on top of him and Booth’s body half fell, half slithered off him. Nick crawled out from underneath, one hand clapped over his wounded eye. He lay on the floor for a long time, his throat on fire. His head felt as if giant, merciless calipers had been screwed into his temples.

At last he felt around, found a candle, and lit it with the desk lighter. By its weak yellow glow he could see Ray Booth lying facedown on the floor. He looked like a dead whale cast up on a beach. The gun had made a blackened circle on the side of his shirt the size of a flapjack. There was a great deal of blood. Booth’s shadow stretched away to the far wall in the candle’s uncertain flicker, huge and unshaped.

Moaning, Nick stumbled into the small bathroom, his hand still clapped over his eye, and then looked into the mirror. He saw blood seeping out from between his fingers and took his hand away reluctantly. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he might now be one-eyed as well as deaf and dumb.

He walked back into the office and kicked Ray Booth’s limp body.

You fixed me, he told the dead man. First my teeth and now my eye. Are you happy? You would have taken both eyes if you could have done it, wouldn’t you? Taken my eyes and left me deaf, dumb, and blind in a world of the dead. How do you like this, home-boy?

He kicked Booth again, and the feel of his foot sinking into that dead meat made him feel ill. After a little bit he retreated to the bunk and sat on it and put his head in his hands. Outside, the dark held hard. Outside, all the lights of the world were going out.

Chapter 34

For a long time, for days (how many days? who knew? not the Trashcan Man, that was for sure), Donald Merwin Elbert, known to the intimates of his dim and confusing grade-school past as the Trashcan Man, had wandered up and down the streets of Powtanville, Indiana, cringing from the voices in his head, dodging away and putting up his hands to shield against stones thrown by ghosts.

Hey, Trashcan!

Hey, Trashcan Man, digging you, Trash! Lit any good fires this week?

What’d ole lady Semple say when you lit up her pension check, Trash?

Hey, Trash-baby, wanna buy some kerosene?

How’d you like those shock-treatments down in Terre Haute, Trashie?

Trash —

–Hey, Trashcan —

Sometimes he knew those voices weren’t real, but sometimes he would cry out loud for them to stop, only to realize that the only voice was his voice, hitting back at him from the houses and storefronts, bouncing off the cinderblock wall of the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash where he used to work and where he now sat on the morning of June 30, eating a big sloppy sandwich of peanut butter and jelly and tomatoes and Gulden’s Diablo mustard. No voice but his voice, hitting the houses and stores and being turned away like an unwanted guest and thus returning to his own ears. Because, somehow, Powtanville was empty. Everyone was gone… or were they? They had always said he was crazy, and that’s something a crazy man would think, that his home town was empty except for himself. But his eyes kept returning to the oil tanks on the horizon, huge and white and round, like low clouds. They stood between Powtanville and the road to Gary and Chicago, and he knew what he wanted to do and that wasn’t a dream. It was bad but not a dream and he wasn’t going to be able to help himself.

Burn your fingers, Trash?

Hey, Trashcan Man, don’t you know playin with fire makes you wet the bed?

Something seemed to whistle past him and he sobbed and held up his hands, dropping his sandwich into the dust, cringing his cheek into his neck, but there was nothing, there was no one. Beyond the cinderblock wall of the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash there was only Indiana Highway 130, going to Gary, but first going past the huge Cheery Oil Company storage tanks. Sobbing a little, he picked up his sandwich, brushed the gray dirt off the white bread as best he could, and began to munch it again.

Were they dreams? Once his father had been alive, and the sheriff had cut him down in the street right outside the Methodist Church, and he had had to live with that his whole life.

Hey, Trash, Sheriff Greeley cut your old man down just like a mad dog, you know that, ya fuckin weirdo?

His father had been in O’Toole’s and there was some bad talk, and Wendell Elbert had a gun and he murdered the bartender with it, then went home and murdered Trashcan’s two older brothers and his sister with it—oh, Wendell Elbert was a strange fellow with a badass temper and he had been getting flaky for a long time before that night, anyone in Powtanville would tell you so, and they would tell you like father like son—and he would have murdered Trashcan’s mother, too, only Sally Elbert had fled screaming into the night with five-year-old Donald (later to be known as the Trashcan Man) in her arms. Wendell Elbert had stood on the front steps, shooting at them as they fled, the bullets whining and striking on the road, and on the last shot the cheap pistol, which Wendell had bought from a nigger in a bar located on Chicago’s State Street, had exploded in his hand. The flying shrapnel had erased most of his face. He had gone wandering up the street with blood running in his eyes, screaming and waving the remainder of the cheap pistol in one hand, the barrel mushroomed and split like the remains of a novelty exploding cigar, and just as he got to the Methodist Church, Sheriff Greeley pulled up in Powtanville’s only squad car and commanded him to stand still and drop the gun. Wendell Elbert pointed the remains of his Saturday night special at the sheriff instead, and Greeley either did not notice that the barrel of the Saturday night special was ruptured or pretended not to notice, and either way the result was the same. He gave Wendell Elbert both barrels of his over and under.

Hey, Trash, ya burned ya COCK off yet?

He looked around for whoever had yelled that—it sounded like Carley Yates or one of the kids who hung out with him—except Carley wasn’t a kid anymore, any more than he was himself.

Maybe now he could be just Don Elbert again instead of the Trashcan Man, the way Carley Yates was now just Carl Yates who sold cars at the Stout Chrysler-Plymouth dealership here in town. Except that Carl Yates was gone, everyone was gone, and maybe it was too late for him to be anyone anymore.

And he wasn’t sitting against the wall of the Scrubba-Dubba anymore; he was a mile or more to the northwest of town, walking along 130, and the town of Powtanville was laid out below him like a scale-model community on a kid’s HO railroad table. The tanks were only half a mile away and he had a toolkit in one hand and a five-gallon can of gas in the other.

Oh it was so bad but —

So after Wendell Elbert was underground, Sally Elbert had gotten a job at the Powtanville Café and sometime, in the first or second grade, her one remaining chick, Donald Merwin Elbert, had started lighting fires in people’s trashcans and running away.

Look out girls here comes the Trashcan Man, he’ll burn up ya dresses!

Eeeek! A freeeak!

It wasn’t until he was in the third grade or so that the grown-ups found out who was doing it and then the sheriff came around, good old Sheriff Greeley, and he guessed that was how the man who cut his father down in front of the Methodist Church ended up being his stepfather.

Hey, Carley, got a riddle for ya: How can your father kill your father?

I dunno, Petey, how?

I dunno either, but it helps if you’re the Trashcan Man!

HeeheehahahaHawHawHaw!

He was standing at the head of the graveled drive now, his shoulders aching from carrying the toolkit and the gas. The sign on the gate read CHEERY PETROLEUM COMPANY, INC. ALL VISITORS MUST CHECK IN AT THE OFFICE! THANKS!

A few cars were parked in the lot, not many. Many were standing on flats. Trashcan Man walked up the drive and slipped through the gate, which was standing ajar. His eyes, blue and strange, were fixed on the spidery stairs that wound around the nearest tank in a spiral, all the way to the top. There was a chain across the bottom of these stairs and another sign swung from the chain. This one said KEEP OFF! PUMPING STATION CLOSED. He stepped over the chain and started up the stairs.

It wasn’t right, his mother marrying that Sheriff Greeley. The year he was in the fourth grade he had started lighting fires in mailboxes, that was the year he burned up old Mrs. Semple’s pension check, and he got caught again. Sally Elbert Greeley went into hysterics the one time her new husband mentioned sending the boy to that place down in Terre Haute (You think he’s crazy! How can a ten-year-old boy be crazy? I think you just want to get rid of him! You got rid of his father and now you want to get rid of him!). The only other thing Greeley could do was to bring the boy up on charges and you can’t send a kid of ten to reform school, not unless you want him to come out with a size eleven asshole, not unless you wanted your new wife to divorce you.

Up the stairs and up the stairs. His feet made little ringing noises on the steel. He had left the voices down below and no one could throw a stone this high; the cars in the parking lot looked like twinkling Corgi toys. There was only the wind’s voice, talking low in his ear and moaning in a vent somewhere; that, and the far-off call of a bird. Trees and open fields spread out all around, all in shades of green only slightly blued by a dreaming morning haze. He was smiling now, happy, as he followed the steel spiral up and up, around and around.

When he got to the tank’s flat, circular cap, it seemed that he must be standing directly under the roof of the world, and if he reached up he could scratch blue chalk from the bottom of the sky with his fingernails. He put the gascan and the toolkit down and just looked. From here you could actually see Gary, because the industrial smokes that usually poured from its factory stacks were absent and the air up that way was as clear as it was down here. Chicago was—a dream wrapped in summer haze, and there was a faint blue glint to the far north that was either Lake Michigan or just wishful thinking. The air had a soft, golden aroma that made him think of a calm breakfast in a well-lighted kitchen. And soon the day would burn.

Leaving the gas where it was, he took the toolkit over to the pumping machinery and began to puzzle it out. He had an intuitive grasp of machinery; he could handle it the way certain idiots savants can multiply and divide seven-digit numbers in their heads. There was nothing thoughtful or cognitive about it; he simply let his eyes wander here and there for a few moments, and then his hands would move with quick, effortless confidence.

Hey, Trashcan, whydja want to burn up a church? Why dintcha burn up the SCHOOL?

When he was in the fifth grade he had started a fire in the living room of a deserted house in the neighboring town of Sedley, and the house burned flat. His stepfather Sheriff Greeley put him in the cooler because a gang of kids had beaten him up and now the grown-ups wanted to start (Why, if it hadn’t rained, we could have lost half the township thanks to that goddam firebug kid!). Greeley told Sally that Donald would have to go down to that place in Terre Haute and have the tests. Sally said she would leave him if he did that to her baby, her only chick and child, but Greeley went ahead and got the judge to sign the order and so the Trashcan Man left Powtanville for a while, for two years, and his mother divorced the sheriff and later that year the voters disowned the sheriff and Greeley ended up going to Gary to work on an auto assembly line. Sally came to see Trash every week and always cried.

Trashcan whispered: “There you are, motherfuck,” and then looked around furtively to see if anyone had heard him say that bad swear. Of course no one had, because he was on top of Cheery Oil’s #1 storage tank, and even if he had been down on the ground, there was no one left. Except for ghosts. Above him, fat white clouds floated by.

A large pipe projected out of the tangle of pumping machinery, its bore better than two feet, its end threaded to take what the oil people called a clutch-hose. It was strictly for outflow or overflow, but the tank was now full of unleaded gasoline and some of it had trickled out, perhaps a pint, cutting shiny tracks through the light fall of dust on the tank. Trashcan stood back, eyes bright, still gripping a large wrench in one hand and a hammer in the other. He dropped them and they clanged.

He wouldn’t need the gasoline he’d brought after all. He picked up the can, yelled “Bombs away!” and dropped it over the side. He watched its tumbling, glinting progress with great interest. A third of the way down it hit the stairs, bounced off, and then fell all the way to the ground, turning over and over, spraying amber gas from the side that had been punched open when it hit the stairs.

He turned back to the outflow pipe. He looked at the shiny puddles of gasoline. He took a package of paper matches from his breast pocket and looked at them, guilty and fascinated and excited. There was an ad on the front that said you could get an education in most anything you wanted at the La Salle Correspondence School in Chicago. I’m standing on a bomb, he thought. He closed his eyes, trembling in fear and ecstasy, the old cold excitement on him, making his toes and fingers feel numb.

Hey, Trash, ya fuckin firebug!

The place in Terre Haute let him go when he was thirteen. They didn’t know if he was cured or not, but they said he was. They needed his room so they could put some other crazy kid in it for a couple of years. Trashcan went home. He was way behind in his schoolwork now, and he couldn’t seem to catch the hang of it. They had given him shock treatments in Terre Haute, and when he got back to Powtanville, he couldn’t remember things. He would study for a test and then forget half the stuff and flunk with a 60 or 40 or something like that.

For a while he didn’t light any fires, though; there was that, at least. Everything had gone back to the way it should be, it seemed. The father-killing sheriff was gone; he was up there in Gary putting headlights on Dodges (“Putting wheels on miscarriages,” his mother sometimes said). His mother was back working in the Powtanville Café. It was all right. Of course, there was CHEERY OIL, the white tanks rising on the horizon like oversized whitewashed tin cans, and behind them the industrial smokes from Gary—where the father-killing sheriff was—as if Gary was already on fire. He often wondered how the Cheery Oil tanks would go up. Three single explosions, loud enough to rip your eardrums to tatters and bright enough to fry your eyeballs in their sockets? Three pillars of fire (father, son, and holy father-killing sheriff) that would burn day and night for months? Or would they maybe not burn at all?

He would find out. The soft summer breeze puffed out the first two matches he lit, and he dropped their blackened stumps onto the riveted steel. Off to his right, near the knee-high railing that circled the edge of the tank, he saw a bug struggling weakly in a puddle of gasoline. I’m like that bug, he thought resentfully, and wondered what kind of a world it was where God would not only let you be caught in a big sticky mess like a bug in a puddle of gas, but leave you there alive and struggling for hours, maybe days… or in his case, for years. It was a world that deserved to burn, that was what. He stood, head bowed, a third match ready to strike when the breeze died.

For a while when he came back he was called loony and halfwit and torchy, but Carley Yates, who was by then three grades ahead, remembered the trashcans and it was Carley’s name that stuck. When he turned sixteen he left school with his mother’s permission (What do you expect? They roont him down there in Terre Haute. I’d sue em if I had the money. Shock treatments, they call it. Goddamned electric chair, I call it!) and went to work at the Scrubba-Dubba Car Wash: soap the headlights/soap the rocker panels/knock the wipers/wipe the mirrors/hey mister you want hotwax with that? And for a little while longer things went their appointed course. People would yell at him from street corners or passing cars, would want to know what ole lady Semple (now four years in her grave) had said when he lit-up her pension check, or if he had wet the bed after he torched that house over in Sedley; and they’d catcall to each other as they lounged in front of the candy store or leaned in the doorway of O’Toole’s; they’d holler to each other to hide their matches or butt their smokes because the Trashcan Man was on his way. The voices all became phantom voices, but the rocks were impossible to ignore when they came whizzing from the mouths of dark alleys or from the other side of the street. Once someone had pegged a half-full can of beer at him from a passing car and the beer can had struck him on the forehead and had driven him to his knees.

That was life: the voices, the occasional flying rock, the Scrubba-Dubba. And on his lunch break he would sit where he had been sitting today, eating the BLT his mother had made for him, looking at the Cheery Oil tanks and wondering which way it would be.

That was life, anyway, until one night he found himself in the vestibule of the Methodist Church with a five-gallon can of gasoline, splashing it everywhere—especially on the heaps of old hymnals in the corner—and he had stopped and thought, This is bad, and maybe worse than that, it’s STUPID, they’ll know who did it, they’d know who did it even if someone else did it, and they’ll “put you away ”; he thought about it and smelled gas while the voices fluttered and circled in his head like bats in a haunted belfry. Then a slow smile came to his face and he had upended the gascan and he had run straight up the center aisle with it, the gas spraying out, all the way from the vestibule to the altar he had run, like a groom late to his own wedding and so eager that he had begun to spray hot fluid more properly meant for his soon-to-be marriage bed.

Then he had run back to the vestibule, pulled a single wooden match from his breast pocket, scratched it on the zipper of his jeans, flung the match on the pile of dripping hymnals, direct hit, kaflump!, and the next day he was riding to the Northern Indiana Correctional Center for Boys past the black and smoldering ribs of the Methodist Church.

And there was Carley Yates leaning against the light standard across from the Scrubba-Dubba, a Lucky Strike pasted in the corner of his mouth, and Carley had yelled his valedictory, his epitaph, his hail and farewell: Hey, Trashcan, whydja wanta burn up a church? Why dintcha burn up the SCHOOL?

He was seventeen when he went to the jail for kids, and when he turned eighteen they sent him over to the state prison, and how long was he there? Who knew? Not the Trashcan Man, that was for sure. No one in stir cared that he had burned the Methodist Church down. There were people in stir who had done much worse. Murder. Rape. Breaking open the heads of old lady librarians. Some of the inmates wanted to do something to him, and some of them wanted him to do something to them. He didn’t mind. It happened after the lights were out. One man with a bald head had said he loved him—I love you, Donald —and that was sure better than dodging rocks. Sometimes he would think, just as long as I can stay in here forever. But sometimes at night he would dream of CHEERY OIL, and in the dreams it was always a single, thundering explosion followed by two others, and the sound was WHAM! … … … … WHAM! WHAM! Huge, toneless explosions slamming their way into bright daylight, shaping the daylight like the blows of a hammer shaping thin copper. And everyone in town would stop what they were doing and look north, toward Gary, toward where the three tanks stood against the sky like oversized whitewashed tin cans. Carley Yates would be trying to sell a two-year-old Plymouth to a young couple with a baby, and he would stop in mid-spiel and look. The idlers in O’Toole’s and in the candy store would crowd outside, leaving their beers and chocolate malteds behind. In the café his mother would pause in front of the cash register. The new boy at the Scrubba-Dubba would straighten from the headlights he had been soaping, the sponge glove still on his hand, looking north as that huge and portentous sound sledgehammered its way into the thin copper routine of the day: WHAMM! That was his dream.

He became a trusty somewhere along the line, and when the strange sickness came they sent him to the infirmary and some days ago there had been no more sick people because all of those who had been sick were now dead. Everybody was dead or had run off, except for a young guard named Jason Debbins, who sat behind the wheel of a prison laundry truck and shot himself.

And where else did he have to go then, except home?

The breeze pressed softly against his cheek and then died.

He struck another match and dropped it. It landed in a small pool of gasoline and the gas caught. The flames were blue. They spread out delicately, a kind of corona with the burned match stub, at its center. Trashcan watched for a moment, paralyzed with fascination, and then he stepped quickly to the stairs that circled around the tank to the bottom, looking back over his shoulder. He could see the pumping machinery through a heat haze now, flickering back and forth like a mirage. The blue flames, no more than two inches high, spread toward the machinery and toward the open pipe in a widening semicircle. The bug’s struggles had ended. It was nothing but a blackened husk.

I could let that happen to me.

But he didn’t seem to want to. It seemed, vaguely, that there might be another purpose in his life now, something very grand and great. So he felt a touch of fear and he began to descend the steps on the run, his shoes clanging, his hand slipping quickly over the steep, rust-pitted railing.

Down and down, circling, wondering how long until the vapor hanging around the mouth of the outflow pipe would catch, how long before heat great enough for ignition would rush down the pipe’s throat and into the tank’s belly.

Hair flying back from his forehead, a terrified grin pasted to his face, the wind roaring in his ears, he rushed down. Now he was halfway, racing past the letters CH, letters twenty feet high and lime green against the white of the tank. Down and down, and if his flying feet stuttered or caught on anything, he would tumble like the gascan had tumbled, his bones breaking like dead branches.

The ground came closer, the white gravel circles around the tanks, the green grass beyond the gravel. The cars in the parking lot began to regain their normal size. And still he seemed to be floating, floating in a dream, and he would never reach the bottom, only run and run and get nowhere. He was next to a bomb and the fuse was lit.

From far overhead there came a sudden bang, like a five-inch Fourth of July firecracker. There was a dim clang, and then something whirred past him. It was part of the outflow pipe, he saw with a sharp and almost delicious fear. It was totally black and twisted into a new and excitingly senseless shape by the heat.

He placed one hand on the railing and vaulted over, hearing something snap in his wrist. Sickening pain flowed up his arm to the elbow. He dropped the last twenty-five feet, landed on the gravel, and went sprawling. The gravel scraped skin from his forearms, but he hardly felt it. He was full of moaning, grinning panic now, and the day seemed very bright.

Trashcan Man scrambled up, craning his head around and back, sending his gaze up even as he began to run again. The top of this middle tank had grown yellow hair, and the hair was growing at an amazing rate. The whole thing could blow at any second.

He ran, his right hand flopping on its broken wrist. He leaped over the parking lot curb, and his feet slapped on asphalt. Now he was across the parking lot, his shadow trailing at his feet, and now he was running straight down the wide gravel access road and bolting through the half-open gate and back onto Highway 130. He ran straight across it and flung himself into the ditch on the far side, landing on a soft bed of dead leaves and wet moss, his arms wrapped around his head, the breath tearing in and out of his lungs like stabbing jackknives.

The oil tank blew. Not WHAMM! but KA-WHAP!, a sound so huge, yet at the same time so short and guttural, that he felt his eardrums actually press in and his eyeballs press out as the air somehow changed. A second explosion followed, then a third, and Trashcan writhed on the dead leaves and grinned and screamed soundlessly. He sat up, holding his hands over his ears, and sudden wind struck him and slapped him flat with such power that he might have been no more than a piece of litter.

The young saplings behind him bent over backward and their leaves made a frantic whirring sound, like the pennants over a used car lot on a windy day. One or two snapped with small cracking sounds, as if someone was shooting a target pistol. Burning pieces of the tank started to fall on the other side of the road, some actually on the road. They hit with a clanging noise, the rivets still hanging in some of the chunks of metal, twisted and black, as the outflow pipe had been.

KA-WHAMMM!

Trashcan sat up again and saw a gigantic firetree beyond the Cheery Oil parking lot. Black smoke was billowing from its top, rising straight to an amazing height before the wind could disrupt it and rafter it away. You couldn’t look at it without squinting your eyes almost shut and now there was radiant heat baking across the road at him, tightening his skin, making it feel shiny. His eyes were gushing water in protest. Another burning chunk of metal, this one better than seven feet across at its widest and shaped like a diamond, fell out of the sky, landed in the ditch twenty feet to his left, and the dry leaves on top of the wet moss were instantly ablaze.

KA-WHAMM-KA-WHAMM!

If he stayed here he would go up in a jigging, screaming blaze of spontaneous combustion. He scrambled to his feet and began to run along the shoulder of the highway in the direction of Gary, the breath getting hotter and hotter in his lungs. The air had begun to taste like heavy metal. Presently he began to feel his hair to see if he had started burning. The sweet stench of gasoline filled the air, seeming to coat him. Hot wind ripped his clothes. He felt like something trying to escape from a microwave oven. The road doubled before his watering eyes, then trebled.

There was another coughing roar as rising air pressure caused the Cheery Oil Company office building to implode. Scimitars of glass whickered through the air. Chunks of concrete and cinderblock rained out of the sky and hailed on the road. A whizzing piece of steel about the size of a and the thickness of a Mars Bar sliced through trashcan’s shirtsleeve and made a thin scrape on his skin. A piece big enough to have turned his head to guava jelly struck in front of his feet and then bounded away, leaving a good-sized crater behind. Then he was beyond the fallout zone, still running, the blood beating in his head as if his very brain had been sprayed with #2 heating oil and then set ablaze.

KA-WHAMM!

That was another one of the tanks, and the air resistance in front of him seemed to disappear and a large warm hand pushed him firmly from behind, a hand that fitted every contour of his body from heels to head; it shoved him forward with his toes barely touching the road, and now his face bore the terrified, pants-wetting grin of someone who has been attached to the world’s biggest kite in a high cap of wind and let loose to fly, fly, baby, up into the sky until the wind goes somewhere else, leaving him to scream all the way down in a helpless power-dive.

From behind a perfect fusillade of explosions, God’s ammunition dump going up in the flames of righteousness, Satan storming heaven, his artillery captain a fiercely grinning fool with red, flayed cheeks, Trashcan Man by name, never to be Donald Merwin Elbert again.

Sights jittering by: cars wrecked off the road, Mr. Strang’s blue mailbox with the flag up, a dead dog with its legs up, a powerline down in a cornfield.

The hand was not pushing him quite so hard now. Resistance had come back in front. Trash risked a glance back over his shoulder and saw that the knoll where the oil tanks had stood was a mass of fire. Everything was burning. The road itself seemed to be on fire back there, and he could see the summer trees going up like torches.

He ran another quarter mile, then dropped into a puffing, blowing, shambling walk. A mile farther on he rested, looking back, smelling the glad smell of burning. With no firetrucks and firefighters to put it out, it would go whatever way the wind took it. It might burn for months. Powtanville would go and the fireline would march south, destroying houses, villages, farms, crops, meadows, forests. It might get as far south as Terre Haute, and it would burn that place he had been in. It might burn farther! In fact—

His eyes turned north again, toward Gary. He could see the town now, its great stacks standing quiet and blameless, like strokes of chalk on a light blue blackboard. Chicago beyond that. How many oil tanks? How many gas stations? How many trains standing silent on sidings, full of LP gas and flammable fertilizer? How many slums, as dry as kindling? How many cities beyond Gary and Chicago?

There was a whole country ripe for burning under the summer sun.

Grinning, Trashcan Man got to his feet and began to walk. His skin was already going lobster red. He didn’t feel it, although that night it would keep him awake in a kind of exaltation. There were bigger and better fires ahead. His eyes were soft and joyful and utterly crazy. They were the eyes of a man who has discovered the great axle of his destiny and has laid his hands upon it.

Chapter 35

“I want to get out of the city,” Rita said without turning around. She was standing on the small apartment balcony, the early morning breeze catching the diaphanous nightgown she wore, blowing yards of the material back through the sliding doors.

“All right,” Larry said. He was sitting at the table, eating a fried egg sandwich.

She turned to him, her face haggard. If she had looked an elegant forty in the park the day he had met her, she now looked like a woman dancing on the chronological knife edge that separates the early sixties from the late. There was a cigarette between her fingers and the tip trembled, making jitters of smoke, as she brought it to her lips and puffed without inhaling.

“I mean it, I’m serious.”

He used his napkin. “I know you are,” he said, “and I can dig it. We have to go.”

Her facial muscles sagged into something like relief, and with an almost (but not quite) subconscious distaste, Larry thought it made her look even older.

“When?”

“Why not today?” he asked.

“You’re a dear boy,” she said. “Would you like more coffee?”

“I can get it.”

“Nonsense. You sit right where you are. I always used to get my husband a second cup. He insisted on it. Although I never saw more than his hairline at breakfast. The rest of him was behind The Wall Street Journal or some dreadful heavy piece of literature. Something not just meaningful, or deep, but positively gravid with meaning. Böll. Camus. Milton, for God’s sake. You’re a welcome change.” She looked back over her shoulder on the way to the kitchenette; her expression was arch. “It would be a shame to hide your face behind a newspaper.”

He smiled vaguely. Her wit seemed forced this morning, as it had all yesterday afternoon. He remembered meeting her in the park, and how he had thought her conversation seemed like a careless spray of diamonds on the green felt of a billiard table. Since yesterday afternoon it had seemed more like the glitter of zircons, near-perfect pastes that were, after all, only pastes.

“Here you are.” She went to set the cup down, and her hand, still trembling, caused hot coffee to slop out onto the side of his forearm. He jerked back from her with an indrawn feline hiss of pain.

“Oh, I’m sorry—” Something more than consternation on her face; there was something there which could almost be terror.

“Its all right—”

“No, I’ll just… a cold rag… don’t… sit right there… clumsy… stupid…”

She burst into tears, harsh caws escaping her as if she had witnessed the messy death of her best friend instead of burning him slightly.

He got to his feet and held her, and didn’t much care for the convulsive way she hugged him in return. It was almost a clutch. Cosmic Clutch, the new album by Larry Underwood, he thought unhappily. Oh shit. You ain’t no nice guy. Here we go again.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s the matter with me, I’m never like this, I’m so sorry…”

“It’s all right, it’s nothing.” He went on soothing her automatically, brushing his hand over her salt-and-pepper hair that would look so much better (all of her would look better, as a matter of fact) after she had put in some heavy time in the bathroom.

Of course he knew what part of the trouble was. It was both personal and impersonal. It had affected him too, but not so suddenly or deeply. With her, it was as if some internal crystal had shattered in the last twenty hours or so.

Impersonally, he supposed, it was the smell. It was coming in through the opening between the apartment living room and the balcony right now, riding the cool early morning breeze that would later give way to still, humid heat if this day was anything like the last three or four. The smell was hard to define in any way that could be correct yet less painful than the naked truth. You could say it was like, moldy oranges or spoiled fish or the smell you sometimes got in subway tunnels when the windows were open; none of them were exactly right. That it was the smell of rotting people, thousands of them, decomposing in the heat behind closed doors was putting it right, but you wanted to shy away from that.

The power was still on in Manhattan, but Larry didn’t think it would be for much longer. It had gone out in most other places already. Last night he had stood on the balcony after Rita was asleep and from this high up you could see that the lights were out in better than half of Brooklyn and all of Queens. There was a dark pocket across 110th all the way to that end of Manhattan Island. Looking the other way you could still see bright lights in Union City and—maybe—Bayonne, but otherwise, New Jersey was black.

The blackness meant more than the loss of lights. Among other things it meant the loss of the air conditioning, the modern convenience that made it possible to live in this particular hardcore urban sprawl after the middle of June. It meant that all the people who had died quietly in their apartments and tenements were now rotting in ovens, and whenever he thought of that his mind returned to the thing he had seen in the comfort station on Transverse Number One. He had dreamed about that, and in his dreams that black, sweet treat came to life and beckoned him.

On a more personal level, he supposed she was troubled by what they had found when they walked down to the park yesterday. She had been laughing and chatty and gay when they started out, but coming back she had begun to be old.

The monster-shouter had been lying on one of the paths in a huge pool of his own blood. His glasses lay with both lenses shattered beside his stiff and outstretched left hand. Some monster had been abroad after all, apparently. The man had been stabbed repeatedly. To Larry’s sickened eyes he looked like a human pincushion.

She had screamed and screamed, and when her hysteria had finally quieted, she insisted that they bury him. So they had. And going back to the apartment, she had been the woman he had found this morning.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Just a little scald. The skin’s hardly red.”

“I’ll get the Unguentine. There’s some in the medicine cabinet.”

She started away, and he grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and made her sit down. She looked up at him from darkly circled eyes.

“What you’re going to do is eat,” he said. “Scrambled eggs, toast, coffee. Then we’re going to get some maps and see what’s the best way to get off Manhattan. We’ll have to walk, you know.”

“Yes… I suppose we will.”

He went into the kitchenette, not wanting to look at the mute need in her eyes anymore, and got the last two eggs from the refrigerator. He cracked them into a bowl, tossed the eggshells into the disposal, and began to beat them.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

“What? I don’t…”

“Which way?” he said with a touch of impatience. He added milk to the eggs and put the skillet back on the stove. “North? New England’s that way. South? I don’t really see the point in that. We could go—”

A strangled sob. He turned and saw her looking at him, her hands warring with each other in her lap, her eyes shiny. She was trying to control herself and having no luck.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, going to her. “What is it?”

“I don’t think I can eat,” she sobbed. “I know you want me to… I’ll try… but the smell …”

He crossed the living room, trundled the glass doors closed along their stainless steel tracks, then latched them firmly.

“There,” he said lightly, hoping the annoyance he felt with her didn’t show.

“Better?”

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “That’s a lot better. I can eat now.”

He went back to the kitchenette and stirred the eggs, which had begun to bubble. There was a grater in the utensil drawer and he ran a block of American cheese along it, making a small pile that he sprinkled into the eggs. Behind him she moved and a moment later Debussy filled the apartment, too light and pretty for Larry’s taste. He didn’t care for light classical music. If you were going to have classical shit, you ought to go whole hog and have your Beethoven or your Wagner or someone like that. Why fuck around?

She had asked him in a casual manner what he did for a living… the casual manner, he reflected with some resentment, of a person for whom anything so simple as “a living” had never been a problem. I was a rock and roll singer, he told her, slightly amazed at how painless that past tense was. Sing with this band for a while, then that one. Sometimes a studio gig. She had nodded and that was the end of it. He had no urge to tell her about “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”—that was the past now. The gap between that life and this was so large he hadn’t really comprehended it yet. In that life he had been running away from a cocaine dealer; in this one he could bury a man in Central Park and accept that (more or less) as a matter of course.

He put the eggs on a plate, added a cup of instant coffee with a lot of cream and sugar, the way she liked it (Larry himself subscribed to the trucker’s credo of “if you wanted a cup of cream and sugar, whydja ask for coffee?”), and brought it to the table. She was sitting on a hassock, holding her elbows and facing the stereo. Debussy strained out of the speakers like melted butter.

“Soup’s on,” he called.

She came to the table with a wan smile, looked at the eggs the way a track and field runner might look at a series of hurdles, and began to eat.

“Good,” she said. “You were right. Thank you.”

“You’re more than welcome,” he said. “Now look. What I’m going to suggest is this. We go down Fifth to Thirty-ninth and turn west. Cross to New Jersey by the Lincoln Tunnel. We can follow 495 northwest to Passaic and… those eggs okay? They’re not spoiled?”

She smiled. “They’re fine.” She forked more into her mouth, followed it with a sip of coffee. “Just what I needed. Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“From Passaic we just ankle it west until the roads are clear enough for us to drive. Then I thought we could turn northeast and head up to New England. Make kind of a buttonhook, do you see what I mean? It looks longer, but I think it’ll end up saving us a lot of hassles. Maybe take a house on the ocean in Maine. Kittery, York, Wells, Ogunquit, maybe Scarborough or Boothbay Harbor. How does that sound?”

He had been looking out the window, thinking as he spoke, and now he turned back to her. What he saw frightened him badly for a moment—it was as if she’d gone insane. She was smiling, but it was a rictus of pain and horror. Sweat stood out on her face in big round droplets.

“Rita? Jesus, Rita, what—”

“—sorry—” She scrambled up, knocking her chair over, and fled across the living room. One foot hooked the hassock she had been sitting on and it rolled on its side like an oversized checker. She almost fell herself.

“Rita? ”

Then she was in the bathroom and he could hear the industrial grinding sound of her breakfast coming up. He slammed his hand flat on the table in irritation, then got up and went in after her. God, he hated it when people puked. It always made you feel like puking yourself. The smell of slightly used American cheese in the bathroom made him want to gag. Rita was sitting on the robin’s-egg-blue tile of the floor, her legs folded under her, her head still hanging weakly over the bowl.

She wiped her mouth with a swatch of toilet paper and then looked up at him supplicatingly, her face as pale as paper.

“I’m sorry, I just couldn’t eat it, Larry. Really. I’m so sorry.”

“Well Jesus, if you knew it was going to make you do that, why did you try?”

“Because you wanted me to. And I didn’t want you to be angry with me. But you are, aren’t you? You are angry with me.”

His mind went back to last night. She had made love to him with such frantic energy that for the first time he had found himself thinking of her age and had been a little disgusted. It had been like being caught in one of those exercise machines. He had come quickly, almost in self-defense it seemed, and a long while later she had fallen back, panting and unfulfilled. Later, while he was on the borderline of sleep, she had drawn close to him and once again he had been able to smell her sachet, a more expensive version of scent his mother had always worn when they went out to the movies, and she had murmured the thing that had jerked him back from sleep and had kept him awake for another two hours: You won’t leave me, will you? You won’t leave me alone?

Before that she had been good in bed, so good that he was stunned. She had taken him back to this place after their lunch on the day they had met, and what had happened had happened quite naturally. He remembered an instant of disgust when he saw how her breasts sagged, and how the blue veins were prominent (it made him think of his mother’s varicose veins), but he had forgotten all about that when her legs came up and her thighs pressed against his hips with amazing strength.

Slow, she had laughed. The last shall be first and the first last.

He had been on the verge when she had pushed him off and gotten cigarettes.

What the hell are you doing? he asked, amazed, while old John Thomas waved indignantly in the air, visibly throbbing.

She had smiled. You’ve got a free hand, don’t you? So do I.

So they had done that while they smoked, and she chatted lightly about all manner of things—although the color had come up in her cheeks and after a while her breath had shortened and what she was saying began to drift off, forgotten.

Now, she said, taking his cigarette and her own and crushing them both out. Let’s see if you can finish what you started. If you can’t, I’ll likely tear you apart.

He finished it, quite satisfactorily for both of them, and they had slipped off to sleep. He woke up sometime after four and watched her sleeping, thinking that there was something to be said for experience after all. He had done a lot of screwing in the last ten years or so, but what had happened earlier hadn’t been screwing. It had been something much better than that, if a little decadent.

Well, she’s had lovers, of course.

This had excited him again, and he woke her up.

And so it had been until they had found the monster-shouter, and last night. There had been other things before then, things that troubled him, but which he had accepted. Something like this, he had rationalized it, if it only makes you a little bit psycho, you’re way ahead.

Two nights ago he had awakened sometime after two and had heard her running a glass of water in the bathroom. He knew she was probably taking another sleeping pill. She had the big red-and-yellow gelatine capsules that were known as “yellowjackets” on the West Coast. Big downers. He told himself she’d probably been taking them long before the superflu had happened.

And there was the way she followed him from place to place in the apartment, too, even standing in the bathroom door and talking to him while he was showering or relieving himself. He was a private bathroom person, but he told himself that some weren’t. A lot of it depended on your upbringing. He would have a talk with her… sometime.

But now…

Was he going to have to carry her on his back? Christ, he hoped not. She had seemed stronger than that, at least she had at first. It was one of the reasons she had appealed to him so strongly that day in the park… the main reason, really. There’s no more truth in advertising, he thought bitterly. How the hell was he qualified to take care of her when he couldn’t even watch out for himself? He’d shown that pretty conclusively after the record had broken out. Wayne Stukey hadn’t been shy about pointing it out, either.

“No,” he told her, “I’m not angry. It’s just that… you know, I’m not your boss. If you don’t feel like eating, just say so.”

“I told you… I said I didn’t think I could—”

“The fuck you did,” he snapped, startled and angry.

She bent her head and looked at her hands and he knew she was struggling to keep from sobbing because he wouldn’t like that. For a moment it made him angrier than ever and he almost shouted: I’m not your father or your fat-cat husband! I’m not going to take care of you! You’ve got thirty years on me, for Christ’s sake! Then he felt the familiar surge of self-contempt and wondered what the hell could be the matter with him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m an insensitive bastard.”

“No you’re not,” she said, and sniffled. “It’s just that… all of this is starting to catch up with me. It… yesterday, that poor man in the park… I thought: no one is ever going to catch the people who did that to him, and put them in jail. They’ll just go on and do it again and again. Like animals in the jungle. And it all began to seem very real. Do you understand, Larry? Can you see what I mean?” She turned her tear-wet eyes up to him.

“Yes,” he said, but he was still impatient with her, and just a trifle contemptuous. It was a real situation, how could it not be? They were in the middle of it and had watched it develop this far. His own mother was dead; he had watched her die, and was she trying to say that she was somehow more sensitive to all this than he was? He had lost his mother and she had lost the man who brought her Mercedes around, but somehow her loss was supposed to be the greater. Well, that was bullshit. Just bullshit.

“Try not to be angry with me,” she said. “I’ll do better.”

I hope so. I sure do hope so.

“You’re fine,” he said, and helped her to her feet. “Come on, now. What do you say? We’ve got a lot to do. Feel up to it?”

“Yes,” she said, but her expression was the same as it had been when he offered her the eggs.

“When we get out of the city, you’ll feel better.”

She looked at him nakedly. “Will I?”

“Sure,” Larry said heartily. “Sure you will.”

They went first-cabin.

Manhattan Sporting Goods was locked, but Larry broke a hole in the show window with a long iron pipe he had found. The burglar alarm brayed senselessly into the deserted street. He selected a large pack for himself and a smaller one for Rita. She had packed two changes of clothes for each of them—it was all he would allow—and he was carrying them in a PanAm flight bag she had found in the closet, along with toothbrushes. The toothbrushes struck him as slightly absurd. Rita was fashionably attired for walking, in white silk deckpants and a shell blouse. Larry wore faded bluejeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

They loaded the packs with freeze-dried foods and nothing else. There was no sense, Larry told her, in weighting themselves down with a lot of other stuff—including more clothes hen they could simply take what they wanted on the other side of the river. She agreed wanly, and her lack of interest nettled him again.

After a short interior debate with himself, he also added a .30-.30 and two hundred rounds of ammunition. It was a beautiful gun, and the pricetag he pulled from the trigger-guard and dropped indifferently on the floor said four hundred and fifty dollars.

“Do you really think we’ll need that?” she asked apprehensively. She still had the .32 in her purse.

“I think we’d better have it,” he told her, not wanting to say more but thinking about the monster-shouter’s ugly end.

“Oh,” she said in a small voice, and he guessed from her eyes that she was thinking about that, too.

“That pack’s not too heavy for you, is it?”

“Oh, no. It isn’t. Really.”

“Well, they have a way of getting heavier as you walk along. You just say the word and I’ll carry it for a while.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, and smiled. After they were on the sidewalk again, she looked both ways and said, “We’re leaving New York.”

“Yes.”

She turned to him. “I’m glad. I feel like… oh, when I was a little girl. And my father would say, ‘We’re going on a trip today.’ Do you remember how that was?”

Larry smiled a little in return, remembering the evenings his mother would say, “That Western you wanted to see is down at the Crest, Larry. Clint Eastwood. What do you say?”

“I guess I do remember,” he said.

She stretched up on her toes, and readjusted the pack a little bit on her shoulders.

“The beginning of a journey,” she said, and then so softly he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly: “The way leads ever on… ”

“What?”

“It’s a line from Tolkien,” she said. “The Lord of the Rings. I’ve always thought of it as sort of a gateway to adventure.”

“The less adventure the better,” Larry said, but almost unwillingly he knew what she meant.

Still she was looking at the street. Near this intersection it was a narrow canyon between high stone and stretches of sun-reflecting thermopane, clogged with cars backed up for miles. It was as if everyone in New York had decided at the same time to park in the streets.

She said: “I’ve been to Bermuda and England and Jamaica and Montreal and Saigon and to Moscow. But I haven’t been on a journey since I was a little girl and my father took my sister Bess and me to the zoo. Let’s go, Larry.”

It was a walk that Larry Underwood never, forgot. He found himself thinking that she hadn’t been so wrong to quote Tolkien at that, Tolkien with his mythic lands seen through the lens of time and half-mad, half-exalted imaginings, peopled with elves and ents and trolls and orcs. There were none of those in New York, but so much had changed, so much was out of joint, that it was impossible not to think of it in terms of fantasy. A man hung from a lamppost at Fifth and East Fifty-fourth, below the park and in a once congested business district, a placard with the single word LOOTER hung around his neck. A cat lying on top of a hexagonal litter basket (the basket still had fresh-looking advertisements for a Broadway show on its sides) with her kittens, giving them suck and enjoying the midmorning sun. A young man with a big grin and a valise who strolled up to them and told Larry he would give him a million dollars for the use of the woman for fifteen minutes. The million, presumably, was in the valise. Larry unslung the rifle and told him to take his million elsewhere. “Sure, man. Don’t hold it against me, you dig it? Can’t blame a—guy for tryin, can you? Have a nice day. Hang loose.”

They reached the corner of Fifth and East Thirty-ninth shortly after meeting that man (Rita, with a hysterical sort of good humor, insisted on referring to him as John Bearsford Tipton, a name which meant nothing to Larry). It was nearly noon, and Larry suggested lunch. There was a delicatessen on the corner, but when he pushed the door open, the smell of rotted meat that came out made her draw back.

“I’d better not go in there if I want to save what appetite I have,” she said apologetically.

Larry suspected he could find some cured meat inside—salami, pepperoni, something like that—but after running across “John Bearsford Tipton” four blocks back, he didn’t want to leave her alone for even the short time it would take to go in and check. So they found a bench half a block west, and ate dehydrated fruit and dehydrated strips of bacon. They finished with cheese spread on Ritz crackers and passed a thermos of iced coffee back and forth.

“This time I was really hungry,” she said proudly.

He smiled back, feeling better. Just to be on the move, to be taking some positive action—that was good. He had told her she would feel better when they got out of New York. At the time it had just been something to say. Now, consulting the rise in his own spirits., he guessed it was true. Being in New York was like being in a graveyard where the dead were not yet quiet. The sooner they got out, the better it would be. She would perhaps revert to the way she had been that first day in the park. They would go to Maine on the secondary roads and set up housekeeping in one of those rich-bitch summer houses. North now, and south in September or October. Boothbay Harbor in the summer, Key Biscayne in the winter. It had a nice ring. Occupied with his thoughts, he didn’t see her grimace of pain as he stood up and shouldered the rifle he had insisted on bringing.

They were moving west now, their shadows behind them—at first as squat as frogs, beginning to lengthen out as the afternoon progressed. They passed the Avenue of the Americas, Seventh Avenue, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth. The streets were crammed and silent, frozen rivers of automobiles in every color, predominated by the yellow of the taxicabs. Many of the cars had become hearses, their decaying drivers still leaning behind the wheels, their passengers slumped as if, weary of the traffic jam, they had fallen asleep. Larry started to think that maybe they’d want to pick up a couple of motorcycles once they got out of the city. That would give them both mobility and a fighting chance to skirt the worst of the clots of dead vehicles which must litter the highways everywhere.

Always assuming she can run a bike, he thought. And the way things were going, it would turn out she couldn’t. Life with Rita was turning out to be a real pain in the butt, at least in some of its aspects. But if push came down to shove, he supposed she could ride pillion behind him.

At the intersection of Thirty-ninth and Seventh, they saw a young man wearing cutoff denim shorts and nothing else lying atop a Ding-Dong Taxi.

“Is he dead?” Rita asked, and at the sound of her voice the young man sat up, looked around, saw them, and waved. They waved back. The young man lay placidly back down.

It was just after two o’clock when they crossed Eleventh Avenue. Larry heard a muffled cry of pain behind him and realized Rita was no longer walking on his left.

She was down on one knee, holding her foot. With something like horror, Larry noticed for the first time that she was wearing expensive open-toed sandals, probably in the eighty-dollar range, just the thing for a four-block stroll along Fifth Avenue while window-shopping, but for a long walk—a hike, really—like the one they hart been making…

The ankle-straps had chafed through her skin. Blood was trickling down her ankles.

“Larry, I’m s—”

He jerked her abruptly to her feet. “What were you thinking about?” he shouted into her face. He felt a moment’s shame at the miserable way she recoiled, but also a mean sort of pleasure. “Did you think you could cab back to your apartment if your feet got tired?”

“I never thought—”

“Well, Christ!” He ran his hands through his hair. “I guess you didn’t. You’re bleeding, Rita. How long has it been hurting?”

Her voice was so low and husky that he had trouble hearing her even in the preternatural silence. “Since… well, since about Fifth and Forty-ninth, I guess.”

“Your feet have been hurting you for twenty fucking blocks and you didn’t say anything? ”

“I thought… it might… go away… not hurt anymore… I didn’t want to… we were making such good time… getting out of the city… I just thought…”

“You didn’t think at all,” he said angrily. “How much good time are we going to make with you like this? Your fucking feet look like you got fucking crucified.”

“Don’t swear at me, Larry,” she said, beginning to sob. “Please don’t… it makes me feel so bad when you… please don’t swear at me.”

He was in an ecstasy of rage now, and later he would not be able to understand why the sight of her bleeding feet had blown all his circuits that way. For the moment it didn’t matter. He screamed into her face: “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! ” The word echoed back from the high-rise apartment buildings, dim and meaningless.

She put her hands over her face and leaned forward, crying. It made him even angrier, and he supposed that part of it was that she really didn’t want to see: she would just as soon put her hands over her face and let him lead her, why not, there had always been someone around to take good care of Our Heroine, Little Rita. Someone to drive the car, do the marketing, wash out the toilet bowl, do the taxes. So let’s put on some of that gagging-sweet Debussy and put our well-manicured hands over our eyes and leave it all up to Larry. Take care of me, Larry, after seeing what happened to the monster-shouter, I’ve decided I don’t want to see anymore. It’s all rawther sordid for one of my breeding and background.

He yanked her hands away. She cringed and tried to put them over her eyes again.

“Look at me.”

She shook her head.

“Goddammit, you look at me, Rita.”

She finally did in a strange, flinching way, as if thinking he would now go to work on her with his fists as well as his tongue. The way a part of him felt now, that would be just fine.

“I want to tell you the facts of life because you don’t seem to understand them. The fact is, we may have to walk another twenty or thirty miles. The fact is, if you get infected from those scrapes, you could get blood poisoning and die. The fact is, you’ve got to get your thumb out of your ass and start helping me.”

He had been holding her by the upper arms, and he saw that his thumbs had almost disappeared into her flesh. His anger broke when he saw the red marks that appeared when he let her go. He stepped away, feeling uncertain again, knowing with sick certainty that he had overreacted. Larry Underwood strikes again. If he was so goddam smart, why hadn’t he checked out her footgear before they started out?

Because that’s her problem, part of him said with surly defensiveness.

No, that wasn’t true. It had been his problem. Because she didn’t know. If he was going to take her with him (and it was only today that he had begun to think how much simpler life would be if he hadn’t), he was just going to have to be responsible for her.

Be damned if I will, the surly voice said.

His mother: You’re a taker, Larry.

The oral hygienist from Fordham, crying out her window after him: I thought you were a nice guy! You ain’t no nice guy!

There’s something left out of you, Larry. You’re a taker.

That’s a lie! That is a goddamned LIE!

“Rita,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

She sat down on the pavement in her sleeveless blouse and her white deckpants, her hair looking gray and old. She bowed her head and held her hurt feet. She wouldn’t look at him.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I… look, I had no right to say those things.” He did, but never mind. If you apologized, things got smoothed over. It was how the world worked.

“Go on, Larry,” she said, “don’t let me slow you down.”

“I said I was sorry,” he told her, his voice a trifle petulant. “We’ll get you some new shoes and some white socks. We’ll…”

“We’ll nothing. Go on.”

“Rita, I’m sorry—”

“If you say that one more time, I’ll scream. You’re a shit and your apology is not accepted. Now go on.”

“I said I was—”

She threw back her head and shrieked. He took a step backward, looking around to see if anyone had heard her, to see if maybe a policeman was running over to see what kind of awful thing that young fellow was doing to the old lady who was sitting on the sidewalk with her shoes off. Culture lag, he thought distractedly, what fun it all is.

She stopped screaming and looked at him. She made a flicking gesture with her hand, as if he was a bothersome fly.

“You better stop,” he said, “or I really will leave you.”

She only looked at him. He couldn’t meet her eyes and so dropped his gaze, hating her for making him do that.

“All right,” he said, “have a good time getting raped and murdered.”

He shouldered the rifle and started off again, now angling left toward the car-packed 495 entrance ramp, sloping down toward the tunnel’s mouth. At the foot of the ramp he saw there had been one hell of a crash; a man driving a Mayflower moving van had tried to butt his way into the main traffic flow and cars were scattered around the van like bowling pins. A burned-out Pinto lay almost beneath the van’s body. The van’s driver hung halfway out of the cab window, head down, arms dangling. There was a fan of dried blood and puke sprayed out below him on the door.

Larry looked around, sure he would see her walking toward him or standing and accusing him with her eyes. But Rita was gone.

“Fuck you,” he said with nervous resentment. “I tried to apologize.”

For a moment he couldn’t go on; he felt impaled by hundreds of angry dead eyes, staring out at him from all these cars. A snatch of Dylan occurred to him: “I waited for you inside the frozen traffic… when you knew I had some other place to be… but where are you tonight, sweet Marie? ”

Ahead, he could see four lanes of westbound traffic disappearing into the black arch of the tunnel, and with something like real dread he saw that the overhead fluorescent bars inside the Lincoln were out. It would be like going into an automobile graveyard. They would let him get halfway and then they would all begin to stir… to come alive… he would hear car doors clicking open and then softly chunking closed… their shuffling footsteps…

A light sweat broke on his body. Overhead a bird called raucously and he jumped. You’re being stupid, he told himself. Kid’s stuff, that’s what this is. All you have to do is stay on the pedestrian catwalk and in no time at all you’ll be—

–strangled by the walking dead.

He licked his lips and tried to laugh. It came out badly. He walked five paces toward the place where the ramp joined the highway and then stopped again. To his left was a Caddy, an El Dorado, and a woman with a blackened troll face was staring out at him. Her nose was pressed into a bulb against the glass. Blood and snot had trickled out onto the window. The man who had been driving the Caddy was slumped over the wheel as if looking for something on the floor. All the Caddy’s windows were rolled up; it would be like a greenhouse in there. If he opened the door the woman would spill out and break open on the pavement like a sack of rotten melons and the smell would be warm and steamy, wet and crawling with decay.

The way it would smell in the tunnel.

Abruptly Larry turned around and trotted back the way he had come, feeling the breeze he was making cool the sweat on his forehead.

“Rita! Rita, listen! I want to—”

The words died as he reached the top of the ramp. Rita was still gone. Thirty-ninth Street dwindled away to a point. He ran from the south sidewalk to the north, squeezing between bumpers and scrambling over hoods almost hot enough to blister his skin. But the north sidewalk was also empty. He cupped his hands around his mouth and cried: “Rita! Rita! ”

His only answer a dead echo: “Rita… ita… ita… ita… ”

By four o’clock dark clouds had begun to build over Manhattan and the sound of thunder rolled back and forth between the city’s cliffs. Lightning forked down at the buildings. It was as if God were trying to frighten the few remaining people out of hiding. The light had become yellow and strange, and Larry didn’t like it. His belly was cramped and when he lit a cigarette it trembled in his hand the way the coffee cup had trembled in Rita’s this morning.

He was sitting at the street end of the access ramp, leaning his back against the lowest bar of the railing. His pack was on his lap, and the .30-.30 was leaning against the railing beside him. He had thought she would get scared and come back before long, but she hadn’t. Fifteen minutes ago he had given up calling her name. The echoes freaked him out.

Thunder rolled again, close this time. A chilly breeze ran its hand over the back of his shirt, which was pasted to his skin with sweat. He was going to have to get inside somewhere or else stop shitting around and go through the tunnel. If he couldn’t work up the guts to go through, he’d have to spend another night in the city and go over the George Washington Bridge in the morning, and that was 140 blocks north.

He tried to think rationally about the tunnel. There was nothing in there that was going to bite him. He’d forgotten to pick up a good big flashlight—Christ, you never remembered everything —but he did have his butane Bic, and there was a guardrail between the catwalk and the road. Anything else… thinking about all those dead people in their cars, for instance… that was just panic talking, comic-book stuff, about as sensible as worrying about the boogeyman in the closet. If that’s all you can think about, Larry note 5, then you’re not going to get along in this brave new world. Not at all. You’re—

A stroke of lightning split the sky almost directly overhead, making him wince. It was followed by a heavy caisson of thunder. He thought randomly, July 1, this is the day you’re supposed to take your sweetie to Coney Island and eat hotdogs by the score. Knock down the three wooden milk-bottles with one ball and win the Kewpie doll. The fireworks at night—

A cold splash of rain struck the side of his face and then another hit the back of his neck and trickled inside the collar of his shirt. Dime-sized drops began to hit around him. He stood up, slung the pack over his shoulders, and hoisted the rifle. He was still not sure which way to go—back to Thirty-ninth or into the Lincoln Tunnel. But he had to get undercover somewhere because it was starting to pour.

Thunder broke overhead with a gigantic roar, making him squeal in terror—a sound no different than those made by Cro-Magnon men two million years before.

“You fucking coward,” he said, and trotted down the ramp toward the maw of the tunnel, his head bent forward as the rain began to come harder. It dripped from his hair. He passed the woman with her nose against the El Dorado’s passenger window, trying not to look but catching her out of the tail of his eye just the same. The rain drummed on the car roofs like jazz percussion. It was coming down so hard it bounced back up again, causing a light mist-haze.

Larry stopped for a moment just outside the tunnel, undecided and frightened again. Then it began to hail, and that decided him. The hailstones were big, stinging. Thunder bellowed again.

Okay, he thought. Okay, okay, okay, I’m convinced. He stepped into the Lincoln Tunnel.

It was much blacker inside than he had imagined it would be. At first the opening behind him cast dim white light ahead and he could see yet more cars, jammed in bumper to bumper (it must have been bad, dying in here, he thought, as claustrophobia wrapped its stealthy banana fingers lovingly around his head and began to first caress and then to squeeze his temples, it must have been really bad, it must have been fucking horrible), and the greenish-white tiles that dressed the upward-curving walls. He could see the pedestrian railing to his right, stretching dimly ahead. On his left, at thirty– or forty-foot intervals, were big support pillars. A sign advised him DO NOT CHANGE LANES. There were dark fluorescents embedded in the tunnel’s roof, and the blank glass eyes of closed-circuit TV cameras. And as he negotiated the first slow, banked curve, bearing gently to the right, the light grew dimmer until all he could see were muted flashes of chrome. After that the light simply ceased to exist at all.

He fumbled out his Bic, held it up, and spun the wheel. The light it provided was pitifully small, feeding his unease rather than assuaging it. Even with the flame turned up all the way it only gave him a circle of visibility about six feet in diameter.

He put it back in his pocket and kept walking, trailing his hand lightly along the railing. There was an echo in here, too, one he liked even less than the one outside. The echo made it sound like someone was behind him… stalking him. He stopped several times, head cocked, eyes wide (but blind), listening until the echo had died off. After a bit he began to shuffle along, not lifting his heels from the concrete, so the echo wouldn’t recur.

Sometime after that he stopped again and flicked the lighter close to his wristwatch. It was four-twenty, but he wasn’t sure what to make of that. In this blackness time seemed to have no objective meaning. Neither did distance, for that matter; how long was the Lincoln Tunnel, anyway? A mile? Two? Surely it couldn’t be two miles under the Hudson River. Let’s say a mile. But if a mile was all it was, he should have been at the other end already. If the average man walks four miles an hour, he can walk one mile in fifteen minutes and he’d already been in this stinking hole five minutes longer than that.

“I’m walking a lot slower,” he said, and jumped at the sound of his own voice. The lighter dropped from his hand and clicked onto the catwalk. The echo spoke back, changed into the dangerously jocular voice of an approaching lunatic:

“… lot slower… lower… lower… ”

“Jesus,” Larry muttered, and the echo whispered back: “zuss… zuss… zuss… ”

He wiped a hand across his face, fighting panic and the urge to give up thought and just run blindly forward. Instead he knelt (his knees popped like pistol shots, frightening him again) and walked his fingers over the miniature topography of the pedestrian catwalk—the chipped valleys in the cement, the ridge of an old cigarette butt, the hill of a tiny tinfoil ball—until at last he happened on his Bic. With an inner sigh he squeezed it tightly in his hand, stood up, and walked on.

Larry was beginning to get himself under control again when his foot struck something stiff and barely yielding. He uttered an inhalatory sort of scream and took two staggering steps backward. He made himself hold steady as he pulled the Bic lighter from his pocket and flicked it. The flame wavered crazily in his trembling grasp.

He had stepped on a soldier’s hand. He was sitting with his back against the tunnel wall, his legs splayed across the walkway, a horrible sentinel left here to bar passage. His glazed eyes stared up at Larry. His lips had fallen away from his teeth and he seemed to be grinning. A switchblade knife jutted jauntily from his throat.

The lighter was growing warm in his hand. Larry let it go out. Licking his lips, holding the railing in a deathgrip, he forced himself forward until the toe of his shoe struck the soldier’s hand again. Then he stepped over, making a comically large stride, and a kind of nightmarish certainty came over him. He would hear the scrape of the soldier’s boots as he shifted, and then the soldier would reach out and clasp his leg in a loose cold grip.

In a shuffling sort of run, Larry went another ten paces and then made himself stop, knowing that if he didn’t stop, the panic would win and he would bolt blindly, chased by a terrible regiment of echoes.

When he felt he had himself under some sort of control, he began to walk again. But now it was worse; his toes shrank inside his shoes, afraid that at any second they might come in contact with another body sprawled on the catwalk… and soon enough, it happened.

He groaned and fumbled the lighter out again. This time it was much worse. The body his foot had struck was that of an old man in a blue suit. A black silk skullcap had fallen from his balding head into his lap. There was a six-pointed star of beaten silver in his lapel. Beyond him were another half a dozen corpses: two woman, a man of middle age, a woman who might have been in her late seventies, two teenage boys.

The lighter was growing too hot to hold any longer. He snapped it off and slipped it back into his pants pocket, where it glowed like a warm coal against his leg. Captain Trips hadn’t taken this group off any more than it had taken the soldier back there. He had seen the blood, the torn clothes, the chipped tiles, the bullet holes. They had been gunned down. Larry remembered the rumors that soldiers had blocked off the points of exit from Island Manhattan. He hadn’t known whether to believe them or not; he had heard so many rumors last week as things were breaking down.

The situation here was easy enough to reconstruct. They had been caught in the tunnel, but they hadn’t been too sick to walk. They got out of their car and began to make their way toward the Jersey side, using the catwalk just as he was doing. There had been a command post, machine-gun emplacement, something.

Had been? Or was now?

Larry stood sweating, trying to make up his mind. The solid darkness provided the perfect theater screen on which the mind could play out its fantasies. He saw: grim-eyed soldiers in germproof suits crouched behind a machine gun equipped with an infrared peeper-scope, their job to cut down any stragglers who tried to come through the tunnel; one single soldier left behind, a suicide volunteer, wearing infrared goggles and creeping toward him with a knife in his teeth; two soldiers quietly loading a mortar with a single poison gas canister.

Yet he couldn’t bring himself to go back. He was quite sure that these imaginings were only vapors, and the thought of retracing his steps was insupportable. Surely the soldiers were now gone. The dead one he’d stepped over seemed to support that. But…

But what was really troubling him, he supposed, were the bodies directly ahead. They were sprawled all over each other for eight or nine feet. He couldn’t just step over them as he had stepped over the soldier. And if he went off the catwalk to go around them, he risked breaking his leg or his ankle. If he was to go on, he would have to… well… he would have to walk over them.

Behind him, in the darkness, something moved.

Larry wheeled around, instantly engulfed with fear at that single gritting sound… a footstep.

“Who’s there?” he shouted, unslinging his rifle.

No answer but the echo. When it faded he heard—or thought he did—the quiet sound of breathing. He stood bug-eyed in the dark, the hairs along the nape of his neck turning into hackles. He held his breath. There was no sound. He was beginning to dismiss it as imagination when the sound came again… a sliding, quiet footstep.

He fumbled madly for his lighter. The thought that it would make him a target never occurred to him. As he pulled it from his pocket the striker wheel caught on the lining momentarily and the lighter tumbled from his hand. He heard a clink as it struck the railing, and then there was a soft bonk as it struck the hood or trunk of a car below.

The sliding footstep came again, a little closer now, impossible to tell how close. Someone coming to kill him and his terror-locked mind gave him a picture of the soldier with the switchblade in his neck, moving slowly toward him in the dark—

The soft, gritting step again.

Larry remembered the rifle. He threw the butt against his shoulder, and began to fire. The explosions were shatteringly loud in the closed space; he screamed at the sound of them but the scream was lost in the roar. Flashbulb images of tile and frozen lanes of traffic exploded one after another like a string of black and white snapshots as fire licked from the muzzle of the .30-.30. Ricochets whined like banshees. The gun whacked his shoulder again and again until it was numb, until he knew that the force of the recoils had turned him on his feet and he was shooting out over the roadway instead of back along the catwalk. He was still unable to stop. His finger had taken over the function of the brain, and it spasmed mindlessly until the hammer began to fall with a dry and impotent clicking sound.

The echoes rolled back. Bright afterimages hung before his eyes in triple exposures. He was faintly aware of the stench of cordite and of the whining sound he was making deep in his chest.

Still clutching the gun he whirled around again, and now it was not the soldiers in their sterile Andromeda Strain suits that he saw on the screen of his interior theater but the Morlocks from the Classic Comics version of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, humped and blind creatures coming out of their holes in the ground where engines ran on and on in the bowels of the earth.

He began to struggle across the soft yet stiff barricade of bodies, stumbling, almost falling, clutching the railing, going on. His foot punched through into some dreadful sliminess and there was a gassy, putrid smell that he barely noticed. He went on, gasping.

Then, from behind him, a scream rose in the darkness, freezing him on the spot. It was a desperate, wretched sound, close to the limits of sanity: “Larry! Oh, Larry, for God’s sake —”

It was Rita Blakemoor.

He turned around. There was sobbing now, wild sobbing that filled the place with fresh echoes. For one wild moment he decided to go on anyway, to leave her. She would find her way out eventually, why burden himself with her again? Then he got hold of himself and shouted, “Rita! Stay where you are! Do you hear me?”

The sobbing continued.

He stumbled back across the bodies, trying not to breathe, his face twisted in an expression of grimacing disgust. Then he ran toward her, not sure how far he had to go because of the distorting quality of the echo. In the end he almost fell over her.

“Larry—” She threw herself against him and clutched his neck with a strangler’s force. He could feel her heart skidding along at a breakneck pace under her shirt. “Larry Larry don’t leave me alone here don’t leave me alone in the dark—”

“No.” He held her tightly. “Did I hurt you? Are… are you shot?”

“No… I felt the wind… one of them went by so close I felt the wind of it… and chips… tile-chips, I think… on my face… cut my face…”

“Oh Jesus, Rita, I didn’t know. I was freaking out in here. The dark. And I lost my lighter… you should have called. I could have killed you.” The truth of it came home to him. “I could have killed you,” he repeated in stunned revelation.

“I wasn’t sure it was you. I went into an apartment house when you went down the ramp. And you came back and called and I almost… but I couldn’t… and then two men came after the rain started… I think they were looking for us… or for me. So I stayed where I was and when they were gone I thought, maybe they’re not gone, maybe they’re hiding and looking for me and I didn’t dare go out until I started to think you’d get to the other side, and I’d never see you again… so I… I… Larry, you won’t leave me, will you? You won’t go away?”

“No,” he said.

“I was wrong, what I said, that was wrong, you were right, I should have told you about the sandals, I mean the shoes, I’ll eat when you tell me to… I… I… oooohhhowww —”

“Shh,” he said, holding her. “It’s all right now. All right.” But in his mind he saw himself firing at her in a blind panic, and thought how easily one of those slugs could have smashed her arm or blown out her stomach. Suddenly he had to go to the bathroom very badly and his teeth wanted to chatter. “We’ll go when you feel like you can walk. Take your time.”

“There was a man… I think it was a man… I stepped on him, Larry.” She swallowed and her throat clicked. “Oh, I almost screamed then, but I didn’t because I thought it might be one of those men up ahead instead of you. And when you called out… the echo… I couldn’t tell if it was you… or…or…”

“There are more dead people up ahead. Can you stand that?”

“If you’re with me. Please… if you’re with me.”

“I will be.”

“Let’s go, then. I want to get out of here.” She shuddered convulsively against him. “I never wanted anything so badly in my life.”

He felt for her face and kissed her, first her nose, then each eye, then her mouth.

“Thank you,” he said humbly, having not the slightest idea what he meant. “Thank you. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” she repeated. “Oh dear Larry. You won’t leave me, will you?”

“No,” he said. “I won’t leave you. Just tell me when you feel like you can, Rita, and we’ll go together.”

When she felt she could, they did.

They got over the bodies, their arms slung about each other’s necks like drunken chums coming home from a neighborhood tavern. Beyond that they came to a blockage of some sort. It was impossible to see, but after running her hands over it, Rita said it might be a bed standing on end. Together they managed to tip it over the catwalk railing. It crashed onto a car below with a loud, echoing bang that made them both jump and clutch each other. Behind where it had been there were more sprawled bodies, three of them, and Larry guessed that these were the soldiers that had shot down the Jewish family. They got over them and went on, holding hands.

A short time later Rita stopped short.

“What’s the matter?” Larry asked. “Is there something in the way?”

“No. I can see, Larry! It’s the end of the tunnel!”

He blinked and realized that he could see, too. The glow was dim and it had come so gradually that he hadn’t been aware of it until Rita had spoken. He could make out a faint shine on the tiles, and the pale blur of Rita’s face closer by. Looking over to the left he could see the dead river of automobiles.

“Come on,” he said, jubilant.

Sixty paces farther along there were more bodies sprawled on the walkway, all soldiers. They stepped over them.

“Why would they only close off New York?” she asked. “Unless maybe… Larry, maybe it only happened in New York!”

“I don’t think so,” he said, but felt a touch of irrational hope anyway.

They walked faster. The mouth of the tunnel was ahead of them now. It was blocked by two huge army convoy trucks parked nose to nose. The trucks blotted out much of the daylight; if they hadn’t been there, Larry and Rita would have had some light much farther back in the tunnel. There was another sprawl of bodies where the catwalk descended to join the ramp leading outside. They squeezed between the convoy trucks, scrambling over the locked bumpers. Rita didn’t look inside, but Larry did. There was a half-assembled tripod machine gun, boxes of ammunition, and canisters of stuff that looked like teargas. Also, three dead men.

As they came outside, a rain-dampened breeze pressed against them, and its wonderfully fresh smell seemed to make it all worthwhile. He said so to Rita, and she nodded and put her head against his shoulder for a moment.

“I wouldn’t go through there again for a million dollars, though,” she said.

“In a few years you’ll be using money for toilet paper,” he said. “Please don’t squeeze the greenbacks.”

“But are you sure—”

“That it wasn’t just New York?” He pointed. “Look.”

The tollbooths were empty. The middle one stood in a heap of broken glass. Beyond them, the westbound lanes were empty for as far as they could see, but the eastbound lanes, the ones which fed into the tunnel and the city they had just left, were crowded with silent traffic. There was an untidy pile of bodies in the breakdown lane, and a number of seagulls stood watch over it.

“Oh dear God,” she said weakly.

“There were as many people trying to get into New York as there were trying to get out of it. I don’t know why they bothered blockading the tunnel on the Jersey end. Probably they didn’t know why, either. Just somebody’s bright idea, busywork—”

But she had sat down on the road and was crying.

“Don’t,” he said, kneeling beside her. The experience in the tunnel was still too fresh for him to feel angry with her. “It’s all right, Rita.”

“What is?” she sobbed. “What is? Just tell me one thing.”

“We’re out, anyway. That’s something. And there’s fresh air. In fact, New Jersey never smelled so good.”

That earned him a wan smile. Larry looked at the scratches on her cheek and temple where the shards of tile had cut her.

“We ought to get you to a drugstore and put some peroxide on those cuts,” he said. “Do you feel up to walking?”

“Yes.” She was looking at him with a dumb gratitude that made him feel uneasy. “And I’ll get some new shoes. Some sneakers. I’ll do just what you tell me, Larry. I want to.”

“I shouted at you because I was upset,” he said quietly. He brushed her hair back and kissed one of the scratches over her right eye. “I’m not such a bad guy,” he added quietly.

“Just don’t leave me.”

He helped her to her feet and slipped an arm around her waist. Then they walked slowly toward the tollbooths and slipped through them, New York behind them and across the river.

Chapter 36

There was a small park in the center of Ogunquit, complete with a Civil War cannon and a War Memorial, and after Gus Dinsmore died, Frannie Goldsmith went there and sat beside the duck pond, idly throwing stones in and watching the ripples spread in the calm water until they reached the lily pads around the edges and broke up in confusion.

She had taken Gus to the Hanson house down on the beach the day before yesterday, afraid that if she waited any longer Gus wouldn’t be able to walk and would have to spend his “final confinement,” as her ancestors would have termed it with such grisly yet apt euphemism, in his hot little cubicle near the public beach parking lot.

She had thought Gus would die that night. His fever had been high and he had been crazily delirious, falling out of bed twice and even staggering around old Mr. Hanson’s bedroom, knocking things over, falling to his knees, getting up again. He cried out to people who were not there, answered them, and watched them with emotions varying from hilarity to dismay until Frannie began to feel that Gus’s invisible companions were the real ones and she was the phantom. She had begged Gus to get back into bed, but for Gus she wasn’t there. She had to keep stepping out of his way; if she hadn’t, he would have knocked her over and walked over her.

At last he had fallen onto the bed and had passed from energetic delirium to a gasping, heavy-breathing unconsciousness that Fran supposed was the final coma. But the next morning when she looked in on him, Gus had been sitting up in bed and reading a paperback Western he had found on one of the shelves. He thanked her for taking care of him and told her earnestly that he hoped he hadn’t said or done anything embarrassing the night before.

When she said he hadn’t, Gus had looked doubtfully around the wreckage of the bedroom and told her she was good to say so, anyway. She made some soup, which he ate with gusto, and when he complained of how hard it was to read without his spectacles, which had been broken while he had been taking his turn on the barricade at the south end of town the week before, she had taken the paperback (over his weak protests) and had read him four chapters in a Western by that woman who lived up north in Haven. Rimfire Christmas, it was called. Sheriff John Stoner was having problems with the rowdier element in the town of Roaring Rock, Wyoming, it seemed—and, worse, he just couldn’t find anything to give his lovely young wife for Christmas.

Fran had gone away more optimistic, thinking that Gus might be recovering. But last night he had been worse again, and he had died at quarter to eight this morning, only an hour and a half ago. He had been rational at the end, but unaware of just how serious his condition was. He had told her longingly that he’d like to have an ice cream soda, the kind his daddy had treated Gus and his brothers to every Fourth of July and again at Labor Day when the fair came to Bangor. But the power was off in Ogunquit by then—it had gone at exactly 9:17 P.M. on the evening of June 28 by the electric clocks—and there was no ice cream to be had in town. She had wondered if someone in town might not have a gasoline generator with a freezer hooked up to it on an emergency circuit, and even thought of hunting up Harold Lauder to ask him, but then Gus began to breathe his final whooping, hopeless breaths. That went on for five minutes while she held his head up with one hand and a cloth under his mouth with the other to catch the thick expectorations of mucus. Then it was over.

Frannie covered him with a clean sheet and had left him on old Jack Hanson’s bed, which overlooked the ocean. Then she had come here and since then had been skipping rocks across the pond, not thinking about much of anything. But she unconsciously realized that it was a good kind of not thinking; it wasn’t like that strange apathy that had shrouded her on the day after her father had died. Since then, she had been more and more herself. She had gotten a rosebush down at Nathan’s House of Flowers and had carefully planted it at the foot of Peter’s grave. She thought it would take hold real well, as her father would have said. Her lack of thought now was a kind of rest, after seeing Gus through the last of it. It was nothing like the prelude to madness she had gone through before. That had been like passing through some gray, foul tunnel full of shapes more sensed than seen; it was a tunnel she never wanted to travel again.

But she would have to think soon about what to do next, and she supposed that thinking would have to include Harold Lauder. Not just because she and Harold were now the last two people in the area, but because she had no idea what would become of Harold without someone to watch out for him. She didn’t suppose that she was the world’s most practical person, but since she was here she would have to do. She still didn’t particularly like him, but at least he had tried to be tactful and had turned out to have some decency. Quite a bit, even, in his own queer way.

Harold had left her alone since their meeting four days ago, probably respecting her wish to grieve for her parents. But she had seen him from time to time in Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac, cruising aimlessly from place to place. And twice, when the wind was right, she had been able to hear the clacking of his typewriter from her bedroom window—the fact that it was quiet enough to hear that sound, although the Lauder house was nearly a mile and a half away, seemed to underline the reality of what had happened. She was a little amused that although Harold had latched on to the Cadillac, he hadn’t thought of replacing his manual typewriter with one of those quiet humming electric torpedoes.

Not that he could have it now, she thought as she stood up and brushed off the seat of her shorts. Ice cream and electric typewriters were things of the past. It made her feel sadly nostalgic, and she found herself wondering again with a sense of deep bewilderment how such a cataclysm could have taken place in only a couple of weeks.

There would be other people, no matter what Harold said. If the system of authority had temporarily broken down, they would just have to find the scattered others and re-form it. It didn’t occur to her to wonder why “authority” seemed to be such a necessary thing to have, any more than it occurred to her to wonder why she had automatically felt responsible for Harold. It just was. Structure was a necessary thing.

She left the park and walked slowly down Main Street toward the Lauder house. The day was warm already, but the air was freshened by a sea breeze. She suddenly wanted to go down to the beach, find a nice piece of kelp, and nibble on it.

“God, you’re disgusting,” she said aloud. Of course she wasn’t disgusting; she was just pregnant. That was it. Next week it would be Bermuda onion sandwiches. With creamy horseradish on top.

She stopped on the corner, still a block from Harold’s, surprised at how long it had been since she had thought of her “delicate condition.” Before, she had always been discovering that I’m-pregnant thought around odd corners, like some unpleasant mess she kept forgetting to clean up: I ought to be sure and get that blue dress to the cleaners before Friday (a few more months and I can hang it in the closet because I’m-pregnant); I guess I’ll take my shower now (in a few months it’ll look like there’s a whale in the shower stall because I’m-pregnant). I ought to get the oil changed in the car before the pistons fall right out of their sockets or whatever (and I wonder what Johnny down at the Citgo would say if he knew I’m-pregnant). But maybe now she had become accustomed to the thought. After all, she was nearly three months along, nearly a third of the way there.

For the first time she wondered with some unease who would help her have her baby.

From behind the Lauder house there came a steady ratcheting clickclickclick of a hand mower, and when Fran came around the corner, what she saw was so strange that only her complete surprise kept her from laughing out loud.

Harold, clad only in a tight and skimpy blue bathing suit, was mowing the lawn. His white skin was sheened with sweat; his long hair flopped against his neck (although to do Harold credit it did appear to have been washed in the not-too-distant past). The rolls of fat above the waistband of his trunks and below the legbands jounced up and down wildly. His feet were green with cut grass to above the ankle. His back had gone reddish, although with exertion or incipient sunburn she couldn’t tell.

But Harold wasn’t just mowing; he was running. The Lauders’ back lawn sloped down to a picturesque, rambling stone wall, and in the middle of it was an octagonal summerhouse. She and Amy used to hold their “teas” there when they were little girls, Frannie remembered with a sudden stab of nostalgia that was unexpectedly painful, back in the days when they could still cry over the ending of Charlotte’s Web and moan happily over Chuckie Mayo, the cutest boy in school. The Lauders’ lawn was somehow English in its greenness and peace, but now a dervish in a blue bathing suit had invaded this pastoral scene. She could hear Harold panting in a way that was alarming to listen to as he turned the northeast corner where the Lauders’ back lawn was divided from the Wilsons’ by a row of mulberry bushes. He roared down the slope of the lawn, bent over the mower’s T-handle. The blades whirred. Grass flew in a green jet, coating Harold’s lower legs. He had mowed perhaps half of the lawn; what was left was a diminishing square with the summerhouse in the middle. He turned the corner at the bottom of the hill and then roared back, for a moment obscured from view by the summerhouse, and then reappearing, bent over his machine like a Formula One race driver. About halfway up, he saw her. At exactly the same instant Frannie said timidly: “Harold?” And she saw that he was in tears.

“Huh!” Harold said—squeaked, actually. She had startled him out of some private world, and for a moment she feared that the startle on top of his exertion would give him a heart attack.

Then he ran for the house, his feet kicking through drifts of mown grass, and she was peripherally aware of the sweet smell it made on the hot summer air.

She took a step after him. “Harold, what’s wrong?”

Then he was bounding up the porch steps. The back door opened, Harold ran inside, and it slammed behind him with a jarring crash. In the silence that descended afterward, a jay called stridently and some small animal made rattling noises in the bushes behind the stone wall. The mower, abandoned, stood with cut grass behind it and high grass before it a little way from the summerhouse where she and Amy had once drunk their Kool-Aid in Barbie’s kitchen cups with their little fingers sticking elegantly off into the air.

Frannie stood indecisive for a while and at last walked up to the door and knocked. There was no answer, but she could hear Harold crying somewhere inside.

“Harold?”

No answer. The weeping went on.

She let herself into the Lauders’ back hall, which was dark, cool, and fragrant—Mrs. Lauder’s cold-pantry opened off the hall to the left, and for as long as Frannie could remember there had been the good smell of dried apples and cinnamon back here, like pies dreaming of creation.

“Harold?”

She walked up the hall to the kitchen and Harold was there, sitting at the table. His hands were clutched in his hair, and his green feet rested on the faded linoleum that Mrs. Lauder had kept so spotless.

“Harold, what’s wrong?”

“Go away!” he yelled tearfully. “Go away, you don’t like me!”

“Yes I do. You’re okay, Harold. Maybe not great, but okay.” She paused. “In fact, considering the circumstances and all, I’d have to say that right now you’re one of my favorite people in the whole world.”

This seemed to make Harold cry harder.

“Do you have anything to drink?”

“Kool-Aid,” he said. He sniffed, wiped his nose, and still looking at the table, added: “It’s warm.”

“Of course it is. Did you get the water at the town pump?” Like many small towns, Ogunquit still had a common pump in back of the town hall, although for the last forty years it had been more of an antiquity than a practical source of water. Tourists sometimes took pictures of it. This is the town pump in the little seaside town where we spent our vacation. Oh, isn’t that quaint.

“Yeah, that’s where I got it.”

She poured them each a glass and sat down. We should be having it in the summerhouse, she thought. We could drink it with our little fingers sticking off into the air. “Harold, what’s wrong?”

Harold uttered a strange, hysterical laugh and fumbled his Kool-Aid to his mouth. He drained the glass and set it down. “Wrong? Now what could be wrong?”

“I mean, is it something specific?” She tasted her Kool-Aid and fought down a grimace. It wasn’t that warm, Harold must have drawn the water only a short time ago, but he had forgotten the sugar.

He looked up at her finally, his face tear-streaked and still wanting to blubber. “I want my mother,” he said simply.

“Oh, Harold—”

“I thought when it happened, when she died, ‘Now that wasn’t so bad.’” He was gripping his glass, staring at her in an intense, haggard way that was a little frightening. “I know how terrible that must sound to you. But I never knew how I would take it when they passed away. I’m a very sensitive person. That’s why I was so persecuted by the cretins at that house of horrors the town fathers saw fit to call a high school. I thought it might drive me mad with grief, their passing, or at least prostrate me for a year… my interior sun, so to speak, would… would… and when it happened, my mother… Amy… my father… I said to myself, ‘Now that wasn’t so bad.’ I… they…” He brought his fist down on the table, making her flinch. “Why can’t I say what I mean?” he screamed. “I’ve always been able to say what I meant! It’s a writer’s job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone, so why can’t I say what it feels like? ”

“Harold, don’t. I know how you feel.”

He stared at her, dumbstruck. “You know… ?” He shook his head. “No. You couldn’t.”

“Remember when you came to the house? And I was digging the grave? I was half out of my mind. Half the time I couldn’t even remember what I was doing. I tried to cook some french fries and almost burned the house down. So if it makes you feel better to mow the grass, fine. You’ll get a sunburn if you do it in your bathing trunks, though. You’re already getting one,” she added critically, looking at his shoulders. To be polite, she sipped a little more of the dreadful Kool-Aid.

He wiped his hands across his mouth. “I never even liked them that well,” he said, “but I thought grief was something you felt anyway. Like your bladder’s full, you have to urinate. And if close relatives die, you have to be grief-stricken.”

She nodded, thinking that was strange but not inapt.

“My mother was always taken with Amy. She was Amy’s friend,” he amplified with unconscious and nearly pitiful childishness. “And I horrified my father.”

Fran saw how that could be. Brad Lauder had been a huge, brawny man, a foreman at the woolen mill in Kennebunk. He would have had very little idea of what to make of the fat, peculiar son that his loins had produced.

“He took me aside once,” Harold resumed, “and asked me if I was a queerboy. That’s just how he said it. I got so scared I cried, and he slapped my face and told me if I was going to be such a goddamned baby all the time, I’d best ride right out of town. And Amy… I think it would be safe to say that Amy just didn’t give a shit. I was just an embarrassment when she brought her friends home. She treated me like I was a messy room.”

With an effort, Fran finished her Kool-Aid.

“So when they were gone and I didn’t feel too much one way or the other, I just thought I was wrong. ‘Grief is not a knee-jerk reaction,’ I said to myself. But I got fooled. I missed them more and more every day. Mostly my mother. If I could just see her… a lot of times she wasn’t around when I wanted her… needed her… she was too busy doing things for Amy, or with Amy, but she was never mean to me. So this morning when I got thinking about it, I said to myself, ‘I’ll mow the grass. Then I won’t think about it.’ But I did. And I started to mow faster and faster… as if I could outrun it… and I guess that’s when you came in. Did I look as crazy as I felt, Fran?”

She reached across the table and touched his hand. “There’s nothing wrong with the way you feel, Harold.”

“Are you sure?” He was looking at her again in that wide-eyed, childish stare.

“Yes.”

“Will you be my friend?”

“Yes.”

“Thank God,” Harold said. “Thank God for that.” His hand was sweaty in hers, and as she thought it, he seemed to sense it, and pulled his hand reluctantly away. “Would you like some more Kool-Aid?” he asked her humbly.

She smiled her best diplomatic smile. “Maybe later,” she said.

They had a picnic lunch in the park: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Hostess Twinkies, and a large bottle of Coke each. The Cokes were fine after they had been cooled in the duck pond.

“I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do,” Harold said. “Don’t you want the rest of that Twinkle?”

“No, I’m full.”

Her Twinkie disappeared into Harold’s mouth in a single bite. His belated grief hadn’t affected his appetite, Frannie observed, and then decided that was a rather mean way to think.

“What?” she said.

“I was thinking of going to Vermont,” he said diffidently. “Would you like to come?”

“Why Vermont?”

“There’s a government plague and communicable diseases center there, in a town called Stovington. It’s not as big as the one in Atlanta, but it’s sure a lot closer. I was thinking that if there were still people alive and working on this flu, a lot of them would be there.”

“Why wouldn’t they be dead, too?”

“Well, they might be, they might be,” Harold said rather prissily. “But in places like Stovington, where they’re used to dealing with communicable diseases, they’re also used to taking precautions. And if they are still in operation, I would imagine they are looking for people like us. People who are immune.”

“How do you know all that, Harold?” She was looking at him with open admiration, and Harold blushed happily.

“I read a lot. Neither of those places are secret. So what do you think, Fran?”

She thought it was a wonderful idea. It appealed to that uncoalesced need for structure and authority. She immediately dismissed Harold’s disclaimer that the people running such an institution might all be dead. They would get to Stovington, they would be taken in, tested, and out of all the tests would come some discrepancy, some difference between them and all the people who had gotten sick and died. It didn’t occur to her just then to wonder what earthly good a vaccine could do at this point.

“I think we ought to find a road atlas and see how to get there yesterday,” she said.

His face lit up. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, and in that single shining moment she probably would have allowed it, but then the moment passed. In retrospect she was glad.

By the road atlas, where all distance was reduced to finger-lengths, it looked simple enough. Number 1 to I-95, I-95 to US 302, and then northwest on 302 through the lake country towns of western Maine, across the chimney of New Hampshire on the same road, and then into Vermont. Stovington was only thirty miles west of Barre, accessible either by Vermont Route 61 or I-89.

“How far is that, altogether?” Fran asked.

Harold got a ruler, measured, and then consulted the mileage scale.

“You won’t believe this,” he said glumly.

“What is it? A hundred miles?”

“Over three hundred.”

“Oh God,” Frannie said. “That kills my idea. I read somewhere that you could walk through most of the New England states in a single day.”

“It’s a gimmick,” Harold said in his most scholarly voice. “It is possible to walk in four states—Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and just across the Vermont state line—in twenty-four hours, if you do it in just the right way, but it’s like solving that puzzle where you have two interlocked nails—it’s easy if you know how, impossible if you don’t.”

“Where in the world did you get that?” she asked, amused.

“Guinness Book of World Records,” he said disdainfully. “Otherwise known as the Ogunquit High School Study Hall Bible. Actually, I was thinking of bikes. Or… I don’t know… maybe motor scooters.”

“Harold,” she said solemnly, “you’re a genius.”

Harold coughed, blushing and pleased again. “We could bike as far as Wells, tomorrow morning. There’s a Honda dealership there… can you drive a Honda, Fran?”

“I can learn, if we can go slow for a while.”

“Oh, I think it would be very unwise to speed,” Harold said seriously. “One would never know when one might come around a blind curve and find a three-car smashup blocking the road.”

“No, one never would, would one? But why wait until tomorrow? Why don’t we go today?”

“Well, it’s past two now,” he said. “We couldn’t get much farther than Wells, and we’d need to outfit ourselves. That would be easier to do here in Ogunquit, because we know where everything is. And we’ll need guns, of course.”

It was queer, really. As soon as he mentioned that word, she had thought of the baby. “Why do we need guns?”

He looked at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes. A red blush was creeping up his neck.

“Because the police and courts are gone and you’re a woman and you’re pretty and some people… some men… might not be… be gentlemen. That’s why.”

His blush was so red now it was almost purple.

He’s talking about rape, she thought. Rape. But how could anybody want to rape me, I’m-pregnant. But no one knew that, not even Harold. And even if you spoke up, said to the intended rapist: Will you please not do that because I’m-pregnant, could you reasonably expect the rapist to reply, Jeez, lady, I’m sorry, I’ll go rape some other goil?

“All right,” she said. “Guns. But we could still get as far as Wells today.”

“There’s something else I want to do here,” Harold said.

The cupola atop Moses Richardson’s barn was explosively hot. Sweat had been trickling down her body by the time they got to the hayloft, but by the time they reached the top of the rickety flight of stairs leading from the loft to the cupola, it was coursing down her body in rivers, darkening her blouse and molding it to her breasts.

“Do you really think this is necessary, Harold?”

“I don’t know.” He was carrying a bucket of white paint and a wide brush with the protective cellophane still on it. “But the barn overlooks US 1, and that’s the way most people would come, I think. Anyway, it can’t hurt.”

“It will hurt if you fall off and break your bones.” The heat was making her head ache, and her lunchtime Coke was sloshing around her stomach in a way that was extremely nauseating. “In fact, it would be the end of you.”

“I won’t fall,” Harold said nervously. He glanced at her. “Fran, you look sick.”

“It’s the heat,” she said faintly.

“Then go downstairs, for goodness’ sake. Lie under a tree. Watch the human fly as he does his death-defying act on the precipitous ten-degree slope of Moses Richardson’s barn roof.”

“Don’t joke. I still think it’s silly. And dangerous.”

“Yes, but I’ll feel better if I go through with it. Go on, Fran.”

She thought: Why, he’s doing it for me.

He stood there, sweaty and scared, old cobwebs clinging to his naked, blubbery shoulders, his belly cascading over the waistband of his tight bluejeans, determined to not miss a bet, to do all the right things.

She stood on tiptoe and kissed his mouth lightly. “You be careful,” she said, and then went quickly down the stairs with the Coke sloshing in her belly, up-down-all-around, yeeeeccchh; she went quickly, but not so quickly that she didn’t see the stunned happiness come up in his eyes. She went down the nailed rungs from the hayloft to the straw-littered barn floor even faster because she knew she was going to puke now, and while she knew that it was the heat and the Coke and the baby, what might Harold think if he heard? So she wanted to get outside where he couldn’t hear. And she made it. Just.

Harold came down at a quarter to four, his sunburn now flaming red, his arms splattered with white paint. Fran had napped uneasily under an elm in Richardson’s dooryard while he worked, never quite going under completely, listening for the rattle of shingles giving way and poor fat Harold’s despairing scream as he fell the ninety feet from the barn’s roof to the hard ground below. But it never came—thank God—and now he stood proudly before her—lawn-green feet, white arms, red shoulders.

“Why did you bother to bring the paint back down?” she asked him curiously.

“I wouldn’t want to leave it up there. It might lead to spontaneous combustion and we’d lose our sign.” And she thought again how determined he was not to miss a single bet. It was just a little bit scary.

They both gazed up at the barn roof. The fresh paint gleamed out in sharp contrast to the faded green shingles, and the words painted there reminded Fran of the signs you sometimes came upon down South, painted across barn roofs—JESUS SAVES or CHEW RED INDIAN. Harold’s read:

HAVE GONE TO STOVINGTON, VT. PLAGUE CENTER

US 1 TO WELLS

INTERSTATE 95 TO PORTLAND

US 302 TO BARRE

INTERSTATE 89 TO STOVINGTON

LEAVING OGUNQUIT JULY 2, 1990

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

FRANCES GOLDSMITH

“I didn’t know your middle name,” Harold said apologetically.

“That’s fine,” Frannie said, still looking up at the sign. The first line had been written just below the cupola window; the last, her name, just above the rain-gutter. “How did you get that last line on?” she asked.

“It wasn’t hard,” he said self-consciously. “I had to dangle my feet over a little, that’s all.”

“Oh, Harold. Why couldn’t you have just signed for yourself?”

“Because we’re a team,” he said, and then looked at her a little apprehensively. “Aren’t we?”

“I guess we are… as long as you don’t kill yourself. Hungry?”

He beamed. “Hungry as a bear.”

“Then let’s go eat. And I’ll put some baby oil on your sunburn. You’re just going to have to wear your shirt, Harold. You won’t be able to sleep on that tonight.”

“I’ll sleep fine,” he said, and smiled at her. Frannie smiled back. They ate a supper of canned food and Kool-Aid (Frannie made it, and added sugar), and later, when it had begun to get dark, Harold came over to Fran’s house with something under his arm.

“It was Amy’s,” he said. “I found it in the attic. I think Mom and Dad gave it to her when she graduated from junior high. I don’t even know if it still works, but I got some batteries from the hardware store.” He patted his pockets, which were bulging with EverReady batteries.

It was a portable phonograph, the kind with the plastic cover, invented for teenage girls of thirteen or fourteen to take to beach and lawn parties. The kind of phonograph constructed with 45 singles in mind—the ones made by the Osmonds, Leif Garrett, John Travolta, Shaun Cassidy. She looked at it closely, and felt her eyes filling with tears.

“Well,” she said, “let’s see if it does.”

It did work. And for almost four hours they sat at the opposite ends of the couch, the portable phonograph on the coffee table before them, their faces lit with silent and sorrowful fascination, listening as the music of a dead world filled the summer night.

Chapter 37

At first Stu accepted the sound without question; it was such a typical part of a bright summer morning. He had just passed through the town of South Ryegate, New Hampshire, and now the highway wound through a pretty country of overhanging elms that dappled the road with coins of moving sunlight. The underbrush on either side was thick—bright sumac, blue-gray juniper, lots of bushes he couldn’t name. The profusion of them was still a wonder to his eyes, accustomed as they were to East Texas, where the roadside flora had nothing like this variety. On the left, an ancient rock wall meandered in and out of the brush, and on the right a small brook gurgled cheerily east. Every now and then small animals would move in the underbrush (yesterday he had been transfixed by the sight of a large doe standing on the white line of 302, scenting the morning air), and birds called raucously. And against that background of sound, the barking dog sounded like the most natural thing in the world.

He walked almost another mile before it occurred to him that the dog—closer now, by the sound—might be out of the ordinary after all. He had seen a great many dead dogs since leaving Stovington, but no live ones. Well, he supposed, the flu had killed most but not all of the people. Apparently it had killed most but not all of the dogs, as well. Probably it would be extremely people-shy by now. When it scented him, it would most likely crawl back into the bushes and bark hysterically at him until Stu left its territory.

He adjusted the straps of the Day-Glo pack he was wearing and refolded the handkerchiefs that lay under the straps at each shoulder. He was wearing a pair of Georgia Giants, and three days of walking had rubbed most of the new from them. On his head was a jaunty, wide-brimmed red felt hat, and there was an army carbine slung across his shoulder. He did not expect to run across marauders, but he had a vague idea that it might be a good idea to have a gun. Fresh meat, maybe. Well, he had seen fresh meat yesterday, still on the hoof, and he had been too amazed and pleased to even think about shooting it.

The pack riding easily again, he went on up the road. The dog sounded as if it was just beyond the next bend. Maybe I’ll see him after all, Stu thought.

He had picked up 302 going east because he supposed that sooner or later it would take him to the ocean. He had made a kind of compact with himself: When I get to the ocean, I’ll decide what I’m going to do. Until then, I won’t think about it at all. His walk, now in its fourth day, had been a kind of healing process. He had thought about taking a ten-speed bike or maybe a motorcycle with which he could thread his way through—the occasional crashes that blocked the road, but instead had decided to walk. He had always enjoyed hiking, and his body cried out for exercise. Until his escape from Stovington he had been cooped up for nearly two weeks, and he felt flabby and out of shape. He supposed that sooner or later his slow progress would make him impatient and he would get the bike or motorcycle, but for now he was content to hike east on this road, looking at whatever he wanted to look at, taking five when he wanted to, or in the afternoon, dropping off for a snooze during the hottest part of the day. It was good for him to be doing this. Little by little the lunatic search for a way out was fading into memory, just something that had happened instead of a thing so vivid it brought cold sweat out onto his skin. The memory of that feeling of someone following him had been the hardest to shake. The first two nights on the road he had dreamed again and again of his final encounter with Elder, when Elder had come to carry out his orders. In the dreams Stu was always too slow with the chair. Elder stepped back out of its arc, pulled the trigger of his pistol, and Stu felt a heavy but painless boxing glove weighted with lead shot land on his chest. He dreamed this over and over until he woke unrested in the morning, but so glad to be alive that he hardly realized it. Last night the dream hadn’t come. He doubted if the willies would stop all at once, but he thought he might be walking the poison out of his system little by little. Maybe he would never get rid of all of it, but when most of it was gone he felt sure he would be able to think better about what came next, whether he had reached the ocean by then or not.

He came around the bend and there was the dog, an auburn-colored Irish setter. It barked joyously at the sight of Stu and ran up the road, toenails clicking on the composition surface, tail wagging frantically back and forth. It jumped up, placing its forepaws on Stu’s belly, and its forward motion made him stagger back a step. “Whoa, boy,” he said, grinning.

The dog barked happily at the sound of his voice and leaped up again.

“Kojak!” a stern voice said, and Stu jumped and stared around. “Get down! Leave that man alone! You’re going to track all over his shirt! Miserable dog!”

Kojak put all four feet on the road again and walked around Stu with his tail between his legs. The tail was still flipping back and forth in suppressed joy despite its confinement, however, and Stu decided this one would never make much of a canine put-on artist.

Now he could see the owner of the voice—and of Kojak, it seemed like. A man of about sixty wearing a ragged sweater, old gray pants… and a beret. He was sitting on a piano stool and holding a palette. An easel with a canvas on it stood before him.

Now he stood up, placed the palette on the piano stool (under his breath Stu heard him mutter, “Now don’t forget and sit on that”), and walked toward Stu with his hand extended. Beneath the beret his fluffy grayish hair bounced in a small and mellow breeze.

“I hope you intend no foul play with that rifle, sir. Glen Bateman, at your service.”

Stu stepped forward and took the outstretched hand (Kojak was growing frisky again, bouncing around Stu but not daring to renew his leaps—not yet, at least). “Stuart Redman. Don’t worry about the gun. I ain’t seen enough people to start shootin em. In fact, I ain’t seen any, until you.”

“Do you like caviar?”

“Never tried it.”

“Then it’s time you did. And if you don’t care for it, there’s plenty of other things. Kojak, don’t jump. I know you’re thinking of renewing your crazed leaps—I can read you like a book—but control yourself. Always remember, Kojak, that control is what separates the higher orders from the lower. Control!”

His better nature thus appealed to, Kojak shrank down on his haunches and began to pant. He had a big grin on his doggy face. It had been Stu’s experience that a grinning dog is either a biting dog or a damned good dog. And this didn’t look like a biting dog.

“I’m inviting you to lunch,” Bateman said. “You’re the first human being I’ve seen, at least in the last week. Will you stay?”

“I’d be glad to.”

“Southerner, aren’t you?”

“East Texas.”

“An Easterner, my mistake.” Bateman cackled at his own wit and turned back to his picture, an indifferent watercolor of the woods across the road.

“I wouldn’t sit down on that piano stool, if I were you,” Stu said.

“Shit, no! Wouldn’t do at all, would it?” He changed course and headed toward the back of the small clearing. Stu saw there was an orange and white cooler chest in the shade back there, with what looked like a white lawn tablecloth folded on top of it. When Bateman fluffed it out, Stu saw that was just what it was.

“Used to be part of the communion set at the Grace Baptist Church in Woodsville,” Bateman said. “I liberated it. I don’t think the Baptists will miss it. They’ve all gone home to Jesus. At least all the Woodsville Baptists have. They can celebrate their communion in person now. Although I think the Baptists are going to find heaven a great letdown unless the management allows them television—or perhaps they call it heavenvision up there—on which they can watch Jerry Falwell and Jack van Impe. What we have here is an old pagan communing with nature instead. Kojak, don’t step on the tablecloth. Control, always remember that, Kojak. In all you do, make control your watchword. Shall we step across the road and have a wash, Mr. Redman?”

“Make it Stu.”

“All right, I will.”

They went down the road and washed in the cold, clear water. Stu felt happy. Meeting this particular man at this particular time seemed somehow exactly right. Downstream from them Kojak lapped at the water and then bounded off into the woods, barking happily. He flushed a wood pheasant and Stu watched it explode up from the brush and thought with some surprise that just maybe everything would be all right. Somehow all right.

He didn’t care much for the caviar—it tasted like cold fish jelly—but Bateman also had a pepperoni, a salami, two tins of sardines, some slightly mushy apples, and a large box of Keebler fig bars. Wonderful for the bowels, fig bars, Bateman said. Stu’s bowels had been giving him no grief at all since he’d gotten out of Stovington and started walking, but he liked fig bars anyway, and helped himself to half a dozen. In fact, he ate hugely of everything.

During the meal, which was eaten largely on Saltines, Bateman told Stu he had been an assistant professor of sociology at Woodsville Community College. Woodsville, he said, was a small town (“famous for its community college and its four gas stations,” he told Stu) another six miles down the road. His wife had been dead ten years. They had been childless. Most of his colleagues had not cared for him, he said, and the feeling had been heartily mutual. “They thought I was a lunatic,” he said. “The strong possibility that they were right did nothing to improve our relations.” He had accepted the superflu epidemic with equanimity, he said, because at last he would be able to retire and paint full-time, as he had always wanted to do.

As he divided the dessert (a Sara Lee poundcake) and handed Stu his half on a paper plate, he said, “I’m a horrible painter, horrible. But I simply tell myself that this July there is no one on earth painting better landscapes than Glendon Pequod Bateman, B.A., M.A., M.F.A. A cheap ego trip, but mine own.”

“Was Kojak your dog before?”

“No—that would have been a rather amazing coincidence, wouldn’t it? I believe Kojak belonged to someone across town. I saw him occasionally, but since I didn’t know what his name was, I have taken the liberty of rechristening him. He doesn’t seem to mind. Excuse me for a minute, Stu.”

He trotted across the road and Stu heard him splashing in the water. He came back shortly, pantslegs rolled to his knees. He was carrying a dripping six-pack of Narragansett beer in each hand.

“This was supposed to go with the meal. Stupid of me.”

“It goes just as well after,” Stu said, pulling a can off the template. “Thanks.”

They pulled their ringtabs and Bateman raised his can. “To us, Stu. May we have happy days, satisfied minds, and little or no low back pain.”

“Amen to that.” They clicked their cans together and drank. Stu thought that a swallow of beer had never tasted so good to him before and probably never would again.

“You’re a man of few words,” Bateman said. “I hope you don’t feel that I’m dancing on the grave of the world, so to speak.”

“No,” Stu said.

“I was prejudiced against the world,” Bateman said. “I admit that freely. The world in the last quarter of the twentieth century had, for me at least, all the charm of an eighty-year-old man dying of cancer of the colon. They say it’s a malaise which has struck all Western peoples as the century—any century—draws to a close. We have always wrapped ourselves in mourning shrouds and gone around crying woe to thee, O Jerusalem… or Cleveland, as the case may be. The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague—the black death—decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We’ve become so used to the idea of the flu—it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn’t it?—that no one but the historians seems to know that a hundred years ago it didn’t exist.

“It’s during the last three decades of any given century that your religious maniacs arise with facts and figures showing that Armageddon is finally at hand. Such people are always there, of course, but near the end of a century their ranks seem to swell… and they are taken seriously by great numbers of people. Monsters appear. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden. Charles Manson and Richard Speck and Ted Bundy in our own time, if you like. It’s been suggested by colleagues even more fanciful than I that Western Man needs an occasional high colonic, a purging, and this occurs at the end of centuries so that he can face the new century clean and full of optimism. And in this case, we’ve been given a super-enema, and when you think about it, that makes perfect sense. We are not, after all, simply approaching the centenary this time. We are approaching a whole new millennium.”

Bateman paused, considering.

“Now that I think about it, I am dancing on the grave of the world. Another beer?”

Stu took one, and thought over what Bateman had said.

“It’s not really the end,” he said at last. “At least, I don’t think so. Just… intermission.”

“Rather apt. Well said. I’m going back to my picture, if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“Have you seen any other dogs?” Bateman asked as Kojak came bounding joyously back across the road.

“No.”

“Nor have I. You’re the only other person I’ve seen, but Kojak seems to be one of a kind.”

“If he’s alive, there will be others.”

“Not very scientific,” Bateman said kindly. “What kind of an American are you? Show me a second dog—preferably a bitch—and I’ll accept your thesis that somewhere there is a third. But don’t show me one and from that posit a second. It won’t do.”

“I’ve seen cows,” Stu said thoughtfully.

“Cows, yes, and deer. But the horses are all dead.”

“You know, that’s right,” Stu agreed. He had seen several dead horses on his walk. In some cases cows had been grazing upwind of the bloating bodies. “Now why should that be?”

“No idea. We all respire in much the same way, and this seems to be primarily a respiratory disease. But I wonder if there isn’t some other factor? Men, dogs, and horses catch it. Cows and deer don’t. And rats were down for a while but now seem to be coming back.” Bateman was recklessly mixing paint on his palette. “Cats everywhere, a plague of cats, and from what I can see, the insects are going on pretty much as they always have. Of course, the little faux pas mankind commits rarely seem to affect them, anyway—and the thought of a mosquito with the flu is just too ridiculous to consider. None of it makes any surface sense. It’s crazy.”

“It sure is,” Stu said, and uncorked another beer. His head was buzzing pleasantly.

“We’re apt to see some interesting shifts in the ecology,” Bateman said. He was making the horrible mistake of trying to paint Kojak into his picture. “Remains to be seen if Homo sapiens is going to be able to reproduce himself in the wake of this—it very much remains to be seen—but at least we can get together and try. But is Kojak going to find a mate? Is he ever going to become a proud papa?”

“Jesus, I guess he might not.”

Bateman stood, put his palette on his piano stool, and got a fresh beer. “I think you’re right,” he said. “There probably are other people, other dogs, other horses. But many of the animals may die without ever reproducing. There may be some animals of those susceptible species who were pregnant when the flu came along, of course. There may be dozens of healthy women in the United States right now who—pardon the crudity—have cakes baking in the oven. But some of the animals are apt to just sink below the point of no return. If you take the dogs out of the equation, the deer—who seem immune—are going to run wild. Certainly there aren’t enough men left around to keep the deer population down. Hunting season is going to be canceled for a few years.”

“Well,” Stu said, “the surplus deer will just starve.”

“No they won’t. Not all of them, not even most of them. Not up here, anyway. I can’t speak for what might happen in East Texas, but in New England, all the gardens were planted and growing nicely before this flu happened. The deer will have plenty to eat this year and next. Even after that, our crops will germinate wild. There won’t be any starving deer for maybe as long as seven years. If you come back this way in a few years, Stu, you’ll have to elbow deer out of your way to get up the road.”

Stu worked this over in his mind. Finally he said, “Aren’t you exaggerating?”

“Not on purpose. There may be a factor or factors I haven’t taken into consideration, but I honestly don’t think so. And we could take my hypothesis about the effect of the complete or almost complete subtraction of the dog population on the deer population and apply it to the relationships between other species. Cats breeding without check. What does that mean? Well, I said rats were down on the Ecological Exchange but making a comeback. If there are enough cats, that may change. A world without rats sounds good at first, but I wonder.”

“What did you mean when you said whether or not people could reproduce themselves was open to question?”

“There are two possibilities,” Bateman said. “At least two that I see now. The first is that the babies may not be immune.”

“You mean, die as soon as they get into the world?”

“Yes, or possibly in utero. Less likely but still possible, the superflu may have had some sterility effect on those of us that are left.”

“That’s crazy,” Stu said.

“So’s the mumps,” Glen Bateman said dryly.

“But if the mothers of the babies that are… are in utero … if the mothers are immune—”

“Yes, in some cases immunities can be passed on from mother to child just as susceptibilities can. But not in all cases. You just can’t bank on it. I think the future of babies now in utero is very uncertain. Their mothers are immune, granted, but statistical probability says that most of the fathers were not, and are now dead.”

“What’s the other possibility?”

“That we may finish the job of destroying our species ourselves,” Bateman said calmly. “I actually think that’s very possible. Not right away, because we’re all too scattered. But man is a gregarious, social animal; and eventually we’ll get back together, if only so we can tell each other stories about how we survived the great plague of 1990. Most of the societies that form are apt to be primitive dictatorships run by little Caesars unless we’re very lucky. A few may be enlightened, democratic communities, and I’ll tell you exactly what the necessary requirement for that kind of society in the 1990s and early 2000s is going to be: a community with enough technical people in it to get the lights back on. It could be done, and very easily. This isn’t the aftermath of a nuclear war, with everything laid to waste. All the machinery is just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along—the right someone, who knows how to clean the plugs and replace a few burned-out bearings—and start it up again. It’s all a question of how many of those who have been spared understand the technology we all took for granted.”

Stu sipped his beer. “Think so?”

“Sure.” Bateman took a swallow of his own beer, then leaned forward and smiled grimly at Stu. “Now let me give you a hypothetical situation, Mr. Stuart Redman from East Texas. Suppose we have Community A in Boston and Community B in Utica. They are aware of each other, and each community is aware of the conditions in the other community’s camp. Society A is in good shape. They are living on Beacon Hill in the lap of luxury because one of their members just happens to be a Con Ed repairman. This guy knows just enough to get the power plant which serves Beacon Hill running again. It would mostly be a matter of knowing which switches to pull when the plant went into an automatic shutdown. Once it’s running, it’s almost all automated anyhow. The repairman can teach other members of Society A which levers to pull and which gauges to watch. The turbines run on oil, of which there is a glut, because everybody who used to use it is as dead as old Dad’s hatband. So in Boston, the juice is flowing. There’s heat against the cold, light so you can read at night, refrigeration so you can have your Scotch on the rocks like a civilized man. In fact, life is pretty damn near idyllic. No pollution. No drug problem. No race problem. No shortages. No money or barter problem, because all the goods, if not the services, are out on display and there are enough of them to last a radically reduced society for three centuries. Sociologically speaking, such a group would probably become communal in nature. No dictatorship here. The proper breeding ground for dictatorship, conditions of want, need, uncertainty, privation… they simply wouldn’t exist. Boston would probably end up being run by a town meeting form of government again.

“But Community B, up there in Utica. There’s no one to run the power plant. The technicians are all dead. It’s going to take a long time for them to figure out how to make things go again. In the meantime, they’re cold at night (and winter is coming), they’re eating out of cans, they’re miserable. A strongman takes over. They’re glad to have him because they’re confused and cold and sick. Let him make the decisions. And of course he does. He sends someone to Boston with a request. Will they send their pet technician up to Utica to help them get their power plant going again? The alternative is a long and dangerous move south for the winter. So what does Community A do when they get this message?”

“They send the guy?” Stu asked.

“Christ’s testicles, no! He might be held against his will, in fact it would be extremely likely. In the post-flu world, technological know-how is going to replace gold as the most perfect medium of exchange. And in those terms, Society A is rich and Society B is poor. So what does Society B do?”

“I guess they go south,” Stu said, then grinned. “Maybe even to East Texas.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they threaten the Boston people with a nuclear warhead.”

“Right,” Stu said. “They can’t get their power plant going, but they can fire a nuclear missile at Beantown.”

Bateman said, “If it was me, I wouldn’t bother with a missile. I’d just try to figure out how to detach the warhead, then drive it to Boston in a station wagon. Think that would work?”

“Dogged if I know.”

“Even if it didn’t, there are plenty of conventional weapons around. That’s the point. All of that stuff is lying around, waiting to be picked up. And if Communities A and B both have pet technicians, they might work up some kind of rusty nuclear exchange over religion, or territoriality or some paltry ideological difference. Just think, instead of six or seven world nuclear powers, we may end up with sixty or seventy of them right here in the continental United States. If the situation were different, I’m sure that there would be fighting with rocks and spiked clubs. But the fact is, all the old soldiers have faded away and left their playthings behind. It’s a grim thing to be thinking about, especially after so many grim things have already happened… but I’m afraid it’s entirely possible.”

A silence fell between them. Far off they could hear Kojak barking in the woods as the day turned on its noontime axis.

“You know,” Bateman said finally, “I’m fundamentally a cheerful man. Maybe because I have a low threshold of satisfaction. It’s made me greatly disliked in my field. I have my faults; I talk too much, as you’ve heard, and I’m a terrible painter, as you’ve seen, and I used to be terribly unwise with money. I sometimes spent the last three days before payday eating peanut butter sandwiches and I was notorious in Woodsville for opening savings accounts and then closing them out a week later. But I never really let it get me down, Stu. Eccentric but cheerful, that’s me. The only bane of my life has been my dreams. Ever since boyhood I’ve been plagued by amazingly vivid dreams. A lot of them have been nasty. As a youngster it was trolls under bridges that reached up and grabbed my foot or a witch that turned me into a bird… I would open my mouth to scream, and nothing but a string of caws would come out. Do you ever have bad dreams, Stu?”

“Sometimes,” Stu said, thinking of Elder, and how Elder lurched after him in his nightmares, and of the corridors that never ended but only switched back on themselves, lit by cold fluorescents and filled with echoes.

“Then you know. When I was a teenager, I had the regular quota of sexy dreams, both wet and dry, but these were sometimes interspersed with dreams in which the girl I was with would change into a toad, or a snake, or even a decaying corpse. As I grew older I had dreams of failure, dreams of degradation, dreams of suicide, dreams of horrible accidental death. The most recurrent was one where I was slowly being crushed to death under a gas station lift. All simple permutations of the troll-dream, I suppose. I really believe that such dreams are a simple psychological emetic, and the people who have them are more blessed than cursed.”

“If you get rid of it, it doesn’t pile up.”

“Exactly. There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud’s being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more—that dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don’t dream—or don’t dream in away they can often remember when they wake up—are mentally constipated in some way. After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream.”

Stu smiled.

“But lately, I’ve had an extremely bad dream. It recurs, like my dream of being crushed to death under the lift, but it makes that one look like a pussycat in comparison. It’s like no other dream I’ve ever had, but somehow it’s like all of them. As if… as if it were the sum of all bad dreams. And I wake up feeling bad, as if it wasn’t a dream at all, but a vision. I know how crazy that must sound.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a man,” Bateman said quietly. “At least, I think it’s a man. He’s standing on the roof of a high building, or maybe it’s a cliff that he’s on. Whatever it is, it’s so high that it sheers away into mist thousands of feet below. It’s near sunset, but he’s looking the other way, east. Sometimes he seems to be wearing bluejeans and a denim jacket, but more often he’s in a robe with a cowl. I can never see his face, but I can see his eyes. He has red eyes. And I have a feeling that he’s looking for me —and that sooner or later he will find me or I will be forced to go to him… and that will be the death of me. So I try to scream, and…” He trailed off with an embarrassed little shrug.

“That’s when you wake up?”

“Yes.” They watched Kojak come trotting back, and Bateman patted him while Kojak nosed in the aluminum dish and cleaned up the last of the poundcake.

“Well, it’s just a dream, I suppose,” Bateman said. He stood up, wincing as his knees popped. “If I were being psychoanalyzed, I suppose the shrink would say the dream expresses my unconscious fear of some leader or leaders who will start the whole thing going again. Maybe a fear of technology in general. Because I do believe that all the new societies which arise, at least in the Western world, will have technology as their cornerstone. It’s a pity, and it needn’t be, but it will be, because we are hooked. They won’t remember—or won’t choose to remember—the corner we had painted ourselves into. The dirty rivers, the hole in the ozone layer, the atomic bomb, the atmospheric pollution. All they’ll remember is that once upon a time they could keep warm at night without expending much effort to do it. I’m a Luddite on top of my other failings, you see. But this dream… it preys on me, Stu.”

Stu said nothing.

“Well, I want to get back,” Bateman said briskly. “I’m halfway drunk already, and I believe there will be thundershowers this afternoon.” He walked to the back of the clearing and rummaged there. A few moments later he came back with a wheelbarrow. He screwed the piano stool down to its lowest elevation, put it in, added his palette, the picnic cooler, and balanced precariously on top of everything else, his mediocre painting.

“You wheeled that all the way out here?” Stu asked.

“I wheeled it until I saw something I wanted to paint. I go different ways on different days. It’s good exercise. If you’re going east, why don’t you come back to Woodsville and spend the night at my house? We can take turns wheeling the barrow, and I’ve got yet another six-pack of beer cooling in yonder stream. That ought to get us home in style.”

“I accept,” Stu said.

“Good man. I’ll probably talk all the way home. You are in the arms of the Garrulous Professor, East Texas. When I bore you, just tell me to shut up. I won’t be offended.”

“I like to listen,” Stu said.

“Then you are one of God’s chosen. Let’s go.”

So they walked on down 302, one of them wheeling the barrow while the other drank a beer. No matter which was which, Bateman talked, an endless monologue that jumped from topic to topic with hardly a pause. Kojak bounced alongside. Stu would listen for a while, then his thoughts would trail off for a while, following their own tangents, and then his mind would come back. He was disquieted by Bateman’s picture of a hundred little enclaves of people, some of them militaristic, living in a country where thousands of doomsday weapons had been left around like a child’s set of blocks. But oddly, the thing his mind kept returning to was Glen Bateman’s dream, the man with no face on top of the high building—or the cliff-edge—the man with the red eyes, his back to the setting sun, looking restlessly to the east.

He woke up sometime before midnight, bathed in sweat, afraid he had screamed. But in the next room, Glen Bateman’s breathing was slow and regular, undisturbed, and in the hallway he could see Kojak sleeping with his head on his paws. Everything was picked out in moonlight so bright it was surreal.

When he woke, Stu had been up on his elbows, and now he lowered himself back to the damp sheet and put an arm over his eyes, not wanting to remember the dream but helpless to avoid it.

He had been in Stovington again. Elder was dead. Everyone was dead. The place was an echoing tomb. He was the only one alive, and he couldn’t find the way out. At first he tried to control his panic. Walk, don’t run, he told himself over and over, but soon he would have to run. His stride was becoming quicker and quicker, and the urge to look back over his shoulder and make sure that it was only the echoes behind him was becoming insuperable.

He walked past closed office doors with names written in black on milky frosted glass. Past an overturned gurney. Past the body of a nurse with her white skirt rucked up to her thighs, her blackened, grimacing face staring at the cold white inverted icecube trays that were the ceiling fluorescents.

At last he began to run.

Faster, faster, the doors slipping by him and gone, his feet pounding on the linoleum. Orange arrows oozing on white cinderblock. Signs. At first they seemed right: RADIOLOGY and CORRIDOR B To LABS and DO NOT PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT VALID PASS. And then he was in another part of the installation, a part he had never seen and had never been meant to see. The paint on these walls had begun to peel and flake. Some of the fluorescents were out; others buzzed like flies caught in a screen. Some of the frosted glass office windows were shattered, and through the stellated holes he had been able to see wreckage and bodies in terrible positions of pain. There was blood. These people had not died of the flu. These people had been murdered. Their bodies had sustained punctures and gunshot wounds and the grisly traumas which could only have been inflicted by blunt instruments. Their eyes bulged and stared.

He plunged down a stopped escalator and into a long dark tunnel lined with tile. At the other end there were more offices, but now the doors were painted dead black. The arrows were bright red. The fluorescents buzzed and flickered. The signs read THIS WAY TO COBALT URNS and LASER ARMORY and SIDEWINDER MISSILES and PLAGUE ROOM. Then, sobbing with relief, he saw an arrow pointing around a right-angled turn, and the single blessed word above it: EXIT.

He went around the corner and the door was standing open. Beyond it was the sweet, fragrant night. He plunged toward the door and then, stepping into it, blocking his way, was a man in jeans and a denim jacket. Stu skidded to a stop, a scream locked in his throat like rusty iron. As the man stepped into the glow of the flickering fluorescents, Stu saw that there was only a cold black shadow where his face should have been, a blackness punched by two soulless red eyes. No soul, but a sense of humor. There was that; a kind of dancing, lunatic glee.

The dark man put out his hands, and Stu saw that they were dripping blood.

“Heaven and earth,” the dark man whispered from that empty hole where his face should have been. “All of heaven and earth.”

Stu had awakened.

Now Kojak moaned and growled softly in the hall. His paws twitched in his sleep, and Stu supposed that even dogs dreamed. It was a perfectly natural thing, dreaming, even an occasional nightmare.

But it was a long time before he could get back to sleep.

Chapter 38

As the superflu epidemic wound down, there was a second epidemic that lasted roughly two weeks. This epidemic was most common in technological societies such as the United States, least common in underdeveloped countries such as Peru or Senegal. In the United States the second epidemic took about 16 percent of the superflu survivors. In places like Peru and Senegal, no more than 3 percent. The second epidemic had no name because the symptoms differed wildly from case to case. A sociologist like Glen Bateman might have called this second epidemic “natural death” or “those ole emergency room blues.” In a strictly Darwinian sense, it was the final cut—the unkindest cut of all, some might have said.

Sam Tauber was five and a half years old. His mother had died on June the twenty-fourth in the Murfreesboro, Georgia, General Hospital. On the twenty-fifth, his father and younger sister, two-year-old April, had died. On June the twenty-seventh, his older brother Mike died, leaving Sam to shift for himself.

Sam had been in shock ever since the death of his mother. He wandered carelessly up and down the streets of Murfreesboro, eating when he was hungry, sometimes crying. After a while he stopped crying, because crying did no good. It didn’t bring the people back. At night his sleep was broken by horrible nightmares in which Papa and April and Mike died over and over, their faces swollen black, a terrible rattling sound in their chests as they strangled on their own snot.

At quarter of ten on the morning of July 2, Sam wandered into a field of wild blackberries behind Hattie Reynolds’s house. Bemused and vacant-eyed, he zigzagged among blackberry bushes that were almost twice as tall as he was, picking the berries and eating them until his lips and chin were smeared black. The thorns ripped at his clothes and sometimes at his bare flesh, but he barely noticed. Bees hummed drowsily around him. He never saw the old and rotted well-cover half buried in tall grass and blackberry creepers. It gave under his weight with a grinding, splintering crash, and Sam plunged twenty feet down the rock-lined shaft to the dry bottom, where he broke both legs. He died twenty hours later, as much from fear and misery as from shock and hunger and dehydration.

Irma Fayette lived in Lodi, California. She was a lady of twenty-six, a virgin, morbidly afraid of rape. Her life had been one long nightmare since June twenty-third, when looting had broken out in town and there had been no police to stop the looters. Irma had a small house on a side street; her mother had lived there with her until she had died of a stroke in 1985. When the looting began, and the gunshots, and the horrifying sound of drunken men roaring up and down the streets of the main business section on motorcycles, Irma had locked all the doors and then had hidden in the spare room downstairs. Since then she had crept upstairs periodically, quiet as a mouse, to get food or to relieve herself.

Irma didn’t like people. If everyone on earth had died but her, she would have been perfectly happy. But that wasn’t the case, Only yesterday, after she had begun cautiously to hope that no one was left in Lodi but her, she had seen a gross and drunken man, a hippie man in a T-shirt that said I GAVE UP SEX AND DRINKING AND IT WAS THE SCARIEST 20 MINUTES OF MY LIFE, wandering up the street with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He had long blond hair which cascaded out from under the gimme cap he was wearing and all the way down to his shoulders. Tucked into the waistband of his tight bluejeans was a pistol. Irma had peeked around the bedroom curtain at him until he was out of sight and then had scurried downstairs to the barricaded spare room as if she had been released from a malign spell.

They were not all dead. If there was one hippie man left, there would be other hippie men. And they would all be rapers. They would rape her. Sooner or later they would find her and rape her.

This morning, before first light, she had crept up to the attic, where her father’s few possessions were stored in cardboard boxes. Her father had been a merchant seaman. He had deserted Irma’s mother in the late sixties. Irma’s mother had told Irma all about it. She had been perfectly frank. Her father had been a beast who got drunk and then wanted to rape her. They all did. When you got married, that gave a man the right to rape you anytime he wanted. Even in the daytime. Irma’s mother always summed up her husband’s desertion in three words, the same words Irma could have applied to the death of almost every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth: “No great loss.”

Most of the boxes contained nothing but cheap trinkets bought in foreign ports—Souvenir of Hong Kong, Souvenir of Saigon, Souvenir of Copenhagen. There was a scrapbook of photographs. Most of them showed her father on ship, sometimes smiling into the camera with his arms about the shoulders of his fellow beasts. Well, probably the disease that they were calling Captain Trips out here had struck him down in whatever place he had run off to. No great loss.

But there was one wooden box with small gold hinges on it, and in this box was a gun. A .45 caliber pistol. It lay on red velvet, and in a secret compartment below the red velvet were some bullets. They were green and mossy-looking, but Irma thought they would work all right. Bullets were metal. They didn’t spoil like milk or cheese.

She loaded the gun under the single cobwebby attic bulb, and then went down to eat her breakfast at her own kitchen table. She would not hide like a mouse in a hole any longer. She was armed. Let the rapers beware.

That afternoon she went out on the front porch to read her book. The name of the book was Satan Is Alive and Well on the Planet Earth. It was grim and joyful stuff. The sinners and the ingrates had gotten their just deserts, just as the book said they would. They were all gone. Except for a few hippie rapers, and she guessed she could handle them. The gun was by her side.

At two o’clock the man with the blond hair came back. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. He saw Irma and his face lighted, no doubt thinking of how lucky he had been to finally discover some “pussy.”

“Hey, baby!” he cried. “It’s just you and me! How long—” Then terror clouded his face as he saw Irma put down her book and raise the .45.

“Hey, listen, put that thing down… is it loaded? Hey—! ”

Irma pulled the trigger. The pistol exploded, killing her instantly. No great loss.

George McDougall lived in Nyack, New York. He had been a teacher of high school mathematics, specializing in remedial work. He and his wife had been practicing Catholics, and Harriett McDougall had borne him eleven children, nine boys and two girls. So between June 22, when his nine-year-old son Jeff had succumbed to what was then diagnosed as “flu-related pneumonia,” and June 29, when his sixteen-year-old daughter Patricia (and oh God she had been so young and so achingly beautiful) had succumbed to what everyone—those that were left—was then calling tube-neck, he had seen the twelve people he loved best in the world pass away while he himself remained healthy and feeling fine. He had joked at school about not being able to remember all his kids’ names, but the order of their passing was engraved on his memory: Jeff on the twenty-second, Marty and Helen on the twenty-third, his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, and finally Pat—and Pat had seemed to be getting better, right up to the end.

George thought he would go mad.

He had begun jogging ten years before, on his doctor’s advice. He didn’t play tennis or handball, paid a kid (one of his, of course) to mow the lawn, and usually drove to the corner store when Harriett needed a loaf of bread. You’re putting on weight, Dr. Warner had said. Lead in the seat. No good for your heart. Try jogging.

So he had gotten a sweatsuit and had gone jogging every night, for short distances at the start, then longer and longer ones. At first he’d felt self-conscious, sure that the neighbors must be tapping their foreheads and rolling their eyes, and then a couple of the men that he had only known to wave to when they were out watering their lawns came and asked if they could join him—probably there was safety in numbers. By that time, George’s two oldest boys had also joined in. It became a sort of neighborhood thing, and although the membership was always evolving as people dropped in and dropped out, it stayed a neighborhood thing.

Now that everyone was gone, he still jogged. Every day. For hours. It was only when he was jogging, concentrating on nothing more than the thud of his tennis shoes on the sidewalk and the swing of his arms and his steady harsh respiration, that he lost that feeling of impending madness. He could not commit suicide because as a practicing Catholic he knew that suicide was a mortal sin and God must be saving him for something, so he jogged. Yesterday he had jogged for almost six hours, until he was completely out of breath and almost retching with exhaustion. He was fifty-one, not a young man anymore, and he supposed that so much running was not good for him, but in another, more important way, it was the only thing that was any good.

So he had gotten up this morning at first light after a mostly sleepless night (the thought that played over and over in his mind was: Jeff-Marty-Helen-Harriett-Bill-George-Junior-Robert-Stanley-Richard-Danny-Frank-Patty-and-I-thought-she-was-getting-better) and put on his sweatsuit. He went out and began to jog up and down the deserted streets of Nyack, his feet sometimes gritting on broken glass, once leaping over a TV set that lay shattered on the pavement, taking him past residential streets where the shades were drawn and also past the horrible three-car crash at the Main Street intersection.

He jogged at first, but it became necessary to run faster and faster to keep the thoughts behind him. He jogged and then he trotted and then he ran and finally he sprinted, a fifty-one-year-old man with gray hair in a gray sweatsuit and white tennis shoes, fleeing up and down empty streets as if all the devils of hell were after him. At quarter past eleven he suffered a massive coronary thrombosis and fell down dead on the corner of Oak and Pine, near a fire plug. The expression on his face was very like gratitude.

Mrs. Eileen Drummond of Clewiston, Florida, got very drunk on DeKuyper crème de menthe on the afternoon of July 2. She wanted to get drunk because if she was drunk she wouldn’t have to think about her family, and crème de menthe was the only kind of alcohol she could stand. She had found a baggie filled with marijuana in her sixteen-year-old’s room the day before and had succeeded in getting stoned, but being stoned only seemed to make things worse. She had sat in her living room all afternoon, stoned and crying over photographs in her scrapbook.

So this afternoon she drank a whole bottle of crème de menthe and then got sick and threw up in the bathroom and then went to bed and lit a cigarette and fell asleep and burned the house down and she didn’t have to think about it anymore, ever. The wind had freshened, and she also burned down most of Clewiston. No great loss.

Arthur Stimson lived in Reno, Nevada. On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, after swimming in Lake Tahoe, he stepped on a rusty nail. The wound turned gangrenous. He diagnosed the trouble by smell and tried to amputate his foot. Halfway through the operation he fainted and died of shock and blood loss in the lobby of Toby Harrah’s gambling casino, where he had attempted the operation.

In Swanville, Maine, a ten-year-old girl named Candice Moran fell off her bike and died of a fractured skull.

Milton Craslow, a rancher in Harding County, New Mexico, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died half an hour later.

In Milltown, Kentucky, Judy Horton was quite pleased with events. Judy was seventeen years old and pretty. Two years before, she had made two serious mistakes: she had allowed herself to get pregnant, and she had allowed her parents to talk her into marrying the boy responsible, a four-eyes engineering student from the state university. At fifteen she had been flattered just to be asked out by a college man (even if he was only a freshman) and for the life of her she couldn’t remember why she had allowed Waldo—Waldo Horton, what a yuck name—to “work his will” on her. And if she was going to be knocked up, why did it have to be him? Judy had also allowed Steve Phillips and Mark Collins to “work their will” on her; they were both on the Milltown High football team (the Milltown Cougars, to be exact, fight-fight-fight-fight-for-the-dear-blue-and-white) and she was a cheerleader. If it hadn’t been for yucky old Waldo Horton, she would have made head cheerleader her junior year, easy. And, getting back to the point, either Steve or Mark would have made more acceptable husbands. They both had broad shoulders and Mark had stone bitchin shoulder-length blond hair. But it was Waldo, it could have been no one but Waldo. All she had to do was look in her diary and do the arithmetic. And after the baby came she wouldn’t have even had to do that. It looked just like him. Yucky.

So for two long years she had struggled along, through a variety of crummy jobs in fast food restaurants and motels, while Waldo went to school. It got so she hated Waldo’s school most of all, even more than the baby and Waldo himself. If he wanted a family so bad, why couldn’t he get out and work? She had. But her parents and his wouldn’t allow it. Alone, Judy could have sweet-talked him into it (she would have gotten him to promise before she let him touch her in bed), but all four of the in-laws had their noses in things all the time. Oh Judy, things will be so much better when Waldo has a good job. Oh Judy, things would look so much brighter if you’d go to church more often. Oh Judy, eat shit and keep smiling until you get it down. Until you get it all down.

Then the superflu had come along and had solved all her problems. Her parents had died, her little boy Petie had died (that was sort of sad, but she got over it in a couple of days), then Waldo’s parents had died, and finally Waldo himself had died and she was free. The thought that she herself might die had never crossed her mind, and of course she didn’t.

They had been living in a large and rambling apartment house in downtown Milltown. One of the features of the place that sold Waldo on it (Judy, of course, didn’t have a say) was a large walk-in meat freezer in the basement. They had taken the apartment in September of 1988, and their apartment was on the third floor, and who always seemed to get stuck taking the roast and the hamburger down to the freezer? Three guesses and the first two don’t count. Waldo and Petie had died at home. By that time you couldn’t get hospital service unless you were a bigwig and the mortuaries were swamped (creepy old places anyway, Judy wouldn’t go near one on a bet), but the power was still on. So she had taken them downstairs and put them in the freezer.

The power had gone off in Milltown three days ago, but it was still fairly cool down there. Judy knew because she went down to look at their dead bodies three or four times a day. She told herself she was just checking. What else could it be? Surely she wasn’t gloating?

She went down on the afternoon of July 2 and forgot to put the rubber wedge under the freezer door. The door swung shut behind her and latched. It was then that she noticed, after two years of coming and going down here, that there was no inside knob on the freezer door. By then it was too warm to freeze, but not too cold to starve. So Judy Horton died in the company of her son and husband after all.

Jim Lee of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, hooked up all the electrical outlets in his house to a gasoline generator and then electrocuted himself trying to start it up.

Richard Hoggins was a young black man who had lived his entire life in Detroit, Michigan. He had been addicted to the fine white powder he called “hehrawn” for the last five years. During the actual superflu epidemic, he had gone through extreme withdrawal as all the pushers and users he knew died or fled.

On this bright summer afternoon he was sitting on a littered stoop, drinking a warm 7-Up and wishing he had a pop, just a small, minor skinpop.

He began to think about Allie McFarlane, and something he had heard about Allie on the streets, just before the shit hit the fan. People were saying that Allie, who was about the third-biggest in Detroit, had just gotten a fine shipment. Everybody was going to get well. None of that brown shit. China White, all kinds of the stuff.

Richie didn’t know for sure where McFarlane would keep a big order like that—it wasn’t healthy to know about such things—but he had heard it said at different times in passing that if the cops ever got a search-writ for the Grosse Pointe house that Allie had bought for his great-uncle, Allie would go away until the new moon turned to gold.

Richie decided to take a walk up to Grosse Pointe. After all, there was nothing better to do.

He got the Lake Shore Drive address of one Erin D. McFarlane from the Detroit phone book and walked out there. It was almost dark by the time he made it and his feet hurt. He was no longer trying to tell himself that this was just a casual stroll; he wanted to shoot and he wanted to bad.

There was a gray fieldstone wall around the estate and Richie went over it like a black shadow, cutting his hands on the broken glass embedded in the top. When he broke a window to gain entry, a burglar alarm went off, causing him to flee halfway down the lawn before he remembered there were no cops to answer. He came back, jittery and slicked with sweat.

The main power was off, and there were easily twenty rooms in the fucking place. He’d have to wait until tomorrow to look properly, and it would still take three weeks to dump the place upside down in the proper way. And the stuff probably wasn’t even here. Christ. Richie felt sick despair wave through him. But he would at least look in the obvious places.

And in the upstairs bathroom, he found a dozen large plastic bags bulging with white powder. They were in the toilet tank, that old standby. Richie stared at them, sick with desire, dimly thinking that Allie must have been greasing all the right people if he could afford to leave a stash like this in a fucking toilet tank. There was enough dope here to last one man sixteen centuries.

He took one bag into the master bedroom and broke it open on the bedspread. His hands trembled as he got his works out and cooked up. It never occurred to him to wonder how much this stuff was cut. On the street the heaviest hit Richie had ever taken was 12 percent pure, and that had put him into a sleep so deep it was nearly a coma. He hadn’t even nodded. Just bang and off he went, outta the blue and into the black.

He injected himself above the elbow and pushed the plunger of his spike home. The stuff was almost 96 percent pure. It hit his bloodstream like a highballing freight and Richie fell down on the bags of heroin, flouring the front of his shirt with it. He was dead six minutes later.

No great loss.

Chapter 39

Lloyd Henreid was down on his knees. He was humming and grinning. Every now and then he would forget what he had been humming and the grin would fade and he would sob a little bit, and then he would forget he was crying and go on humming. The song he was humming was “Camptown Races.” Every now and then, instead of humming or sobbing, he would whisper “Doo-dah, doo-dah” under his breath. The holding cellblock was utterly quiet except for the humming, the sobbing, the occasional doo-dah, and the soft scrape of the cotleg as Lloyd fumbled with it. He was trying to turn Trask’s body around so he could get at the leg. Please, waiter, bring me some more of that cole slaw and another leg.

Lloyd looked like a man who had embarked upon a radical crash diet. His prison coverall hung on his body like a limp sail. The last meal served in the holding cellblock had been lunch eight days ago. Lloyd’s skin was stretched tightly across his face, limning every curve and angle of the skull beneath. His eyes were bright and glittering. His lips had drawn back from his teeth. He had an oddly piebald look, because his hair had begun to fall out in clumps. He looked crazy.

“Doo-dah, doo-dah,” Lloyd whispered as he fished with his cotleg. Once upon a time he hadn’t known why he had bothered hurting his fingers to unscrew the damn thing. Once upon a time he had thought he had known what real hunger was. That hunger had been nothing but a slight edge to the appetite when compared with this.

“Ride around all night… ride around all day… doo-dah…”

The cotleg snagged the calf of Trask’s pantsleg and then pulled free. Lloyd put his head down and sobbed like a child. Behind him, tossed indifferently in one corner, was the skeleton of the rat he had killed in Trask’s cell on June 29, five days ago. The rat’s long pink tail was still attached to the skeleton. Lloyd had tried repeatedly to eat the tail but it was too tough. Almost all the water in the toilet bowl was gone despite his efforts to conserve it. The cell was filled with the reek of urine; he had been peeing out into the corridor so as not to contaminate his water supply. He had not—and this was understandable enough, considering the radically reduced conditions of his diet—had to move his bowels.

He had eaten the food he had squirreled away too fast. He knew that now. He had thought someone would come. He hadn’t been able to believe—

He didn’t want to eat Trask. The thought of eating Trask was horrible. Just last night he had managed to slap one of his slippers over a cockroach and had eaten it alive; he had felt it scuttering madly around inside his mouth just before his teeth had crunched it in two. Actually, it hadn’t been half bad, much tastier than the rat. No, he didn’t want to eat Trask. He didn’t want to be a cannibal. It was like the rat. He would get Trask over within reaching distance… but just in case. Just in case. He had heard a man could go a long time without food as long as he had water.

(not much water but I won’t think about that now not just now no not just now)

He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to starve. He was too full of hate.

The hate had built up at a fairly leisurely pace over the last three days, growing with his hunger. He supposed that, if his long-dead pet rabbit had been capable of thought, it would have hated him in the same way (he slept a great deal tow, and his sleep was always troubled with dreams of his rabbit, its body swollen, its fur matted, the maggots squirming in its eyes, and worst of all, those bloody paws: when he awoke he would look at his own fingers in dread fascination). Lloyd’s hate had coalesced around a simple imagistic concept, and this concept was THE KEY.

He was locked in. Once upon a time it had seemed right that he should be. He was one of the bad guys. Not a really bad guy; Poke had been the really bad guy. Small shit was the worst he would have done without Poke. Still, he shared a certain amount of the blame. There had been Gorgeous George in Vegas, and the three people in the white Continental—he had been in on that, and he supposed he had owned some of that heat. He supposed he deserved to take a fall, do a little time. It wasn’t something you volunteered for, but when they had you cold they gave you the bullet and you ate it. Like he had told the lawyer, he thought he deserved about twenty for his part in the “tri-state killspree.” Not in the electric chair, Christ no. The thought of Lloyd Henreid riding the lightning was just… it was crazy.

But they had THE KEY, that was the thing. They could lock you up and do what they wanted with you.

In the last three days, Lloyd had vaguely begun to grasp the symbolic, talismanic power of THE KEY. THE KEY was your reward for playing by the rules. If you didn’t, they could lock you up. It was no different than the Go to Jail card in Monopoly. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. And with THE KEY went certain prerogatives. They could take away ten years of your life, or twenty, or forty. They could hire people like Mathers to beat on you. They could even take away your life in the electric chair.

But having THE KEY didn’t give them the right to go away and leave you locked up to starve. It didn’t give them the right to force you into eating a dead rat and to try to eat the dry ticking of your mattress. It didn’t give them the right to leave you in a spot where you might just have to eat the man in the next cell to stay alive (if you can get ahold of him, that is—doo-dah, doo-dah).

There were certain things you just couldn’t do to people. Having THE KEY only took you so far and no farther. They had left him here to die a horrible death when they could have let him out. He wasn’t a mad dog killer who was going to waste the first person he saw, in spite of what the papers had said. Small shit was the worst he had ever gotten into before meeting Poke.

So he hated, and the hate commanded him to live… or at least to try. For a while it seemed to him that the hate and the determination to go on living were useless things, because all of those who had THE KEY had succumbed to the flu. They were beyond the reach of his vengeance. Then, little by little, as he grew hungrier, he realized that the flu wouldn’t kill them. It would kill the losers like him; it would kill Mathers but not that scumbag screw who had hired Mathers because the screw had THE KEY. It wasn’t going to kill the governor or the warden—the guard who said the warden was sick had obviously been a fucking liar. It wasn’t going to kill the parole officers, the county sheriffs, or the FBI agents. The flu would not touch those who had THE KEY. It wouldn’t dare. But Lloyd would touch them. If he lived long enough to get out of here, he would touch them plenty.

The cotleg snagged in Trask’s cuff again.

“Come on,” Lloyd whispered. “Come on. Come on over here… camptown ladies sing dis song… all doo-dah day.”

Trask’s body slid slowly, stiffly, along the floor of his cell. No fisherman ever played a bonita more carefully or with greater wile than Lloyd played Trask. Once Trask’s trousers ripped and Lloyd had to hook on in a new place. But at last his foot was close enough so that Lloyd could reach through the bars and grab it… if he wanted to.

“Nothing personal,” he whispered to Trask. He touched Trask’s leg. He caressed it. “Nothing personal, I ain’t going to eat you, old buddy. Not less I have to.”

He was not even aware that he was salivating.

Lloyd heard someone in the ashy afterglow of dusk, and at first the sound was so far away and so strange—the clash of metal on metal—that he thought he must be dreaming it. The waking and sleeping states had become very similar to him now; he crossed back and forth across that boundary almost without knowing it.

But then the voice came and he snapped upright on his cot, his eyes flaring wide, huge and lambent in his starved face. The voice came floating down the corridors from God knew how far up in the Administration Wing and then down the stairwell to the hallways which connected the visiting areas to the central cellblock, where Lloyd was. It bobbed serenely through the twice-barred doors and finally reached Lloyd’s ears:

“Hooooo-hoooo! Anybody home? ”

And strangely, Lloyd’s first thought was: Don’t answer. Maybe he’ll go away.

“Anybody home? Going once, going twice?… Okay, I’m on my way, just about to shake the dust of Phoenix from my boots —”

At that, Lloyd’s paralysis broke. He catapulted off the cot, snatched up the cotleg, and began to beat it frantically on the bars; the vibrations raced up the metal and shivered in the bones of his clenched fist.

“No! ” he screamed. “No! Don’t go! Please don’t go! ”

The voice, closer now, coming from the stairway between the Administration and this floor: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so… and oh, someone sounds so… hungry.” This was followed by a lazy chuckle.

Lloyd dropped the cotleg on the floor and wrapped both hands around the bars of the cell door. Now he could hear the footfalls somewhere up in the shadows, clocking steadily down the hall that led to the holding cellblock. Lloyd wanted to burst into tears of relief… after all, he was saved… yet it was not joy but fear he felt in his heart, a growing dread that made him wish he had stayed silent. Stayed silent? My God! What could be worse than starvation?

Starvation made him think of Trask. Trask lay sprawled on his back in the ashy afterglow of dusk, one leg stretched stiffly into Lloyd’s cell, and an essential subtraction had occurred in the region of that leg’s calf. The fleshy part of that leg’s calf. There were teeth-marks there. Lloyd knew whose teeth had made those marks, but he had only the vaguest memory of lunching on filet of Trask. All the same, powerful feelings of revulsion, guilt, and horror filled him. He rushed across to the bars and pushed Trask’s leg back into his own cell. Then, looking over his shoulder to make sure the owner of the voice was not yet in sight, he reached through, and with the dividing bars pressed against his face, he pulled Trask’s pantsleg down, hiding what he had done.

Of course there was no great hurry, because the barred gates at the head of the cellblock were shut, and with the power off, the pushbutton wouldn’t work. His rescuer would have to go back and find THE KEY. He would have to—

Lloyd grunted as the electric motor which operated the barred gates, whined into life. The silence of the cellblock magnified the sound, which ceased with the familiar click-slam! of the gates locking open.

Then the steps were clocking steadily up the cellblock walkway.

Lloyd had gone to his cell door again after neatening up Trask; now he involuntarily fell back two steps. He dropped his gaze to the floor outside and what he saw first was a pair of dusty cowboy boots with pointed toes and rundown heels and his first thought was that Poke had had a pair like that.

The boots stopped in front of his cell.

His gaze rose slowly, taking in the faded jeans snugged down over the boots, the leather belt with the brass buckle (various astrological signs inside a pair of concentric circles), the jeans jacket with a button pinned to each of the breast pockets—a smiley-smile face on one, a dead pig and the words HOW’S YOUR PORK on the other.

At the same instant Lloyd’s eyes reluctantly reached Randall Flagg’s darkly flushed face, Flagg screamed “Boo! ” The single sound floated down the dead cellblock and then rushed back. Lloyd shrieked, stumbled over his own feet, fell down, and began to cry.

“That’s all right,” Flagg soothed. “Hey, man, that’s all right. Everything’s purely all right.”

Lloyd sobbed: “Can you let me out? Please let me out. I don’t want to be like my rabbit, I don’t want to end up like that, it’s not fair, if it wasn’t for Poke I never would have got into anything but small shit, please let me out, mister, I’ll do anything.”

“You poor guy. You look like an advertisement for a summer vacation at Dachau.”

Despite the sympathy in Flagg’s voice, Lloyd could not bring himself to raise his eyes beyond the knees of the newcomer’s jeans. If he looked into that face again, it would kill him. It was the face of a devil.

“Please,” Lloyd mumbled. “Please let me out. I’m starving.”

“How long you been shitcanned, my friend?”

“I don’t know,” Lloyd said, wiping his eyes with thin fingers. “A long time.”

“How come you’re not dead already?”

“I knew what was coming,” Lloyd told the bluejeaned legs as he drew the last tattered shreds of his cunning around him. “I saved up my food. That’s what.”

“Didn’t happen to have a chomp on this fine fellow in the next cell, by any chance?”

“What?” Lloyd croaked. “What? No! Christ’s sake! What do you think I am? Mister, mister, please—”

“His left leg there looks a little thinner than his right one. That’s the only reason I asked, my good friend.”

“I don’t know nothing about that,” Lloyd whispered. He was trembling all over.

“How about Br’er Rat? How did he taste?”

Lloyd put his hands over his face and said nothing.

“What’s your name?”

Lloyd tried to say, but all that came out was a moan.

“What’s your name, soldier?”

“Lloyd Henreid.” He tried to think what to say next, but his mind was a chaotic jumble: He had been afraid when his lawyer told him he might go to the electric chair, but not this afraid. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. “It was all Poke’s idea!” he screamed. “Poke should be here, not me!”

“Look at me, Lloyd.”

“No,” Lloyd whispered. His eyes rolled wildly.

“Why not?”

“Because…”

“Go on.”

“Because I don’t think you’re real,” Lloyd whispered. “And if you are real… mister, if you’re real, you’re the devil.”

“Look at me, Lloyd.”

Helplessly, Lloyd turned his eyes up to that dark, grinning face that hung behind an intersection of bars. The right hand held something up beside the right eye. Looking at it made Lloyd feel cold and hot all over. It looked like a black stone, so dark it seemed almost resinous and pitchy. There was a red flaw in the center of it, and to Lloyd it looked like a terrible eye, bloody and half-open, peering at him. Then Flagg turned it slightly between his fingers, and the red flaw in the dark stone looked like… a key. Flagg turned it back and forth between his fingers. Now it was the eye, now it was the key.

The eye, the key.

He sang: “She brought me coffee… she brought me tea… she brought me… damn near everything… but the workhouse key. Right, Lloyd?”

“Sure,” Lloyd said huskily. His eyes never left the small dark stone. Flagg began to walk it from one finger to the next like a magician doing a trick.

“Now you’re a man who must appreciate the value of a good key,” the man said. The dark stone disappeared in his clenched fist and suddenly reappeared in his other hand, where it began to finger-walk again. “I’m sure you are. Because what a key is for is opening doors. Is there anything more important in life than opening doors, Lloyd?”

“Mister, I’m awfully hungry…”

“Sure you are,” the man said. An expression of concern spread over his face, an expression so magnified that it became grotesque. “Jesus Christ, a rat isn’t anything to eat! Why, do you know what I had for lunch? I had a nice rare roast beef sandwich on Vienna bread with a few onions and a lot of Gulden’s Spicy Brown. Sound good?”

Lloyd nodded his head, tears oozing slowly out of his overbright eyes.

“Had some homefries and chocolate milk to go with it, and then for dessert… holy crow, I’m torturing you, ain’t I? Someone ought to take a hosswhip to me, that’s what they ought to do. I’m sorry. I’ll let you right out and then we’ll go get something to eat, okay?”

Lloyd was too stunned to even nod. He had decided that the man with the key was indeed a devil, or even more likely a mirage, and the mirage would stand outside his cell until Lloyd finally dropped dead, talking happily about God and Jesus and Gulden’s Spicy Brown mustard as he made the strange black stone appear and disappear. But now the compassion on the man’s face seemed real enough, and he sounded genuinely disgusted with himself. The black stone disappeared into his clenched fist again. And when the fist opened, Lloyd’s wondering eyes beheld a flat silver key with an ornate grip lying on the stranger’s palm.

“My—dear—God! ” Lloyd croaked.

“You like that?” the dark man asked, pleased. “I learned that trick from a massage parlor honey in Secaucus, New Jersey, Lloyd. Secaucus, home of the world’s greatest pig farms.”

He bent and seated the key in the lock of Lloyd’s cell. And that was strange, because as well as his memory served him (which right now was not very well), these cells had no keyways, because they were all opened and shut electronically. But he had no doubt that the silver key would work.

Just as it rattled home, Flagg stopped and looked at Lloyd, grinning slyly, and Lloyd felt despair wash over him again. It was all just a trick.

“Did I introduce myself? The name is Flagg, with the double g. Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Lloyd croaked.

“And I think, before I open this cell and we go get some dinner, we ought to have a little understanding, Lloyd.”

“Sure thing,” Lloyd croaked, and began to cry again.

“I’m going to make you my righthand man, Lloyd. Going to put you right up there with Saint Peter. When I open this door, I’m going to slip the keys to the kingdom right into your hand. What a deal, right?”

“Yeah,” Lloyd whispered, growing frightened again. It was almost full dark now. Flagg was little more than a dark shape, but his eyes were still perfectly visible. They seemed to glow in the dark like the eyes of a lynx, one to the left of the bar that ended in the lockbox, one to the right. Lloyd felt terror, but something else as well: a kind of religious ecstasy. A pleasure. The pleasure of being chosen. The feeling that he had somehow won through… to something.

“You’d like to get even with the people who left you here, isn’t that right?”

“Boy, that sure is,” Lloyd said, forgetting his terror momentarily. It was swallowed up by a starving, sinewy anger.

“Not just those people, but everyone who would do a thing like that,” Flagg suggested. “It’s a type of person, isn’t it? To a certain type of person, a man like you is nothing but garbage. Because they are high up. They don’t think a person like you has a right to live.”

“That’s just right,” Lloyd said. His great hunger had suddenly been changed into a different kind of hunger. It had changed just as surely as the black stone had changed into the silver key. This man had expressed all the complex things he had felt in just a handful of sentences. It wasn’t just the gate-guard he wanted to get even with—why, here’s the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say? —because the gate-guard wasn’t the one. The gate-guard had had THE KEY, all right, but the gate-guard had not made THE KEY. Someone had given it to him. The warden, Lloyd supposed, but the warden hadn’t made THE KEY, either. Lloyd wanted to find the makers and forgers. They would be immune to the flu, and he had business with them. Oh yes, and it was good business.

“You know what the Bible says about people like that?” Flagg asked quietly. “It says the exalted shall be abased and the mighty shall be brought low and the stiffnecked shall be broken. And you know what it says about people like you, Lloyd? It says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And it says blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”

Lloyd was nodding. Nodding and crying. For a moment it seemed that a blazing corona had formed around Flagg’s head, a light so bright that if Lloyd looked at it for long it would burn his eyes to cinders. Then it was gone… if it had ever been there at all, and it must not have been, because Lloyd had not even lost his night vision.

“Now you aren’t very bright,” Flagg said, “but you are the first. And I have the feeling you might be very loyal. You and I, Lloyd, we’re going to go far. It’s a good time for people like us. Everything is starting up for us. All I need is your word.”

“W-word?”

“That we’re going to stick together, you and me. No denials. No falling asleep on guard duty. There will be others very soon—they’re on their way west already—but for now, there’s just us. I’ll give you the key if you give me your promise.”

“I… promise,” Lloyd said, and the words seemed to hang in the air, vibrating strangely. He listened to that vibration, his head cocked to one side, and he could almost see those two words, glowing as darkly as the aurora borealis reflected in a dead man’s eye.

Then he forgot about them as the tumblers made their half-turns inside the lockbox. The next moment the lockbox fell at Flagg’s feet, tendrils of smoke seeping from it.

“You’re free, Lloyd. Come on out.”

Unbelieving, Lloyd touched the bars hesitantly, as if they might burn him; and indeed, they did seem warm. But when he pushed, the door slid back easily and soundlessly. He stared at his savior, those burning eyes.

Something was placed in his hand. The key.

“It’s yours now, Lloyd.”

“Mine?”

Flagg grabbed Lloyd’s fingers and closed them around it… and Lloyd felt it move in his hand, felt it change. He uttered a hoarse cry and his fingers sprang open. The key was gone and in its place was the black stone with the red flaw. He held it up, wondering, and turned it this way and that. Now the red flaw looked like a key, now like a skull, now like a bloody, half-closed eye again.

“Mine,” Lloyd answered himself. This time he closed his hand with no help, holding the stone savagely tight.

“Shall we get some dinner?” Flagg asked. “We’ve got a lot of driving to do tonight.”

“Dinner,” Lloyd said. “All right.”

“There’s such a lot to do,” Flagg said happily. “And we’re going to move very fast.” They walked toward the stairs together, past the dead men in their cells. When Lloyd stumbled in weakness, Flagg seized his arm above the elbow and bore him up. Lloyd turned and looked into that grinning face with something more than gratitude. He looked at Flagg with something like love.

Chapter 40

Nick Andros lay sleeping but not quiet on the bunk in Sheriff Baker’s office. He was naked except for his shorts and his body was lightly oiled with sweat. His last thought before sleep had taken him the night before was that he would be dead by morning; the dark man that had consistently haunted his feverish dreams would somehow break through that last thin barrier of sleep and take him away.

It was strange. The eye which Ray Booth had gouged into darkness had hurt for two days. Then, on the third, the feeling that giant calipers had been screwed into his head had faded down to a dull ache. There was nothing but a gray blur when he looked through that eye now, a gray blur in which shapes sometimes moved, or seemed to move. But it wasn’t the eye injury which was killing him; it was the bullet-graze down his leg.

He had gone without disinfecting it. The pain in his eye had been so great that he had barely been aware of it. The graze ran shallowly along his right thigh and ended at the knee; the next day he had examined the bullet hole in his pants where the slug had exited with some wonder. And on that next day, June 30, the wound had been red along the edges and all the muscles of that leg seemed to ache.

He had limped down to Dr. Soames’s office and had gotten a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He had poured the whole bottle of peroxide over the bullet wound, which was about ten inches long. It had been a case of locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. By that evening his entire right leg was throbbing like a rotten tooth, and under the skin he could see the telltale red lines of blood poisoning radiating out from the wound, which had only begun to scab over.

On July first he had gone down to Soames’s office again and had rummaged through his drug closet, looking for penicillin. He found some, and after a moment’s hesitation, he swallowed both of the pills in one of the sample packets. He was well aware that he would die if his body reacted strongly against the penicillin, but he thought the alternative might be an even nastier death. The infection was racing, racing. The penicillin did not kill him, but there was no noticeable improvement, either.

By yesterday noon he had been running a high fever, and he suspected he had been delirious a great deal of the time. He had plenty of food but didn’t want to eat it; all he seemed to want to do was drink cup after cup of the distilled water in the cooler which stood in Baker’s office. That water had been almost gone when he fell asleep (or passed out) last night, and Nick had no idea how he might get more. In his feverish state, he didn’t care much. He would die soon, and there would be nothing to worry about anymore. He was not crazy about the idea of dying, but the thought of having no more pain or worry was a great relief. His leg throbbed and itched and burned.

His sleep those days and nights after the killing of Ray Booth had not seemed like sleep at all. His dreams were a flood. It seemed that everyone he had ever known was coming back for a curtain call. Rudy Sparkman, pointing at the white sheet of paper: You are this blank page. His mother, tapping lines and circles she had helped him make on another white page, marring its purity: It says Nick Andros, honey. That’s you. Jane Baker, her face turned aside on the pillow, saying, Johnny, my poor Johnny. In his dreams Dr. Soames asked John Baker again and again to take off his shirt, and again and again Ray Booth said, Hold im… I’m gonna mess im up… sucker hit me… hold im… Unlike all the other dreams he had had in his life, Nick did not have to lip-read these. He could actually hear what people were saying. The dreams were incredibly vivid. They would fade as the pain in his leg brought him close to waking. Then a new scene would appear as he sank down into sleep again. There were people he had never seen in two of the dreams, and these were the dreams he remembered the most clearly when he woke up.

He was on a high place. The land was spread out below him like a relief map. It was desert land, and the stars above had the mad clarity of altitude. There was a man beside him… no, not a man but the shape of a man. As if the figure had been cut from the fabric of reality and what really stood beside him was a negative man, a black hole in the shape of a man. And the voice of this shape whispered: Everything you see will be yours if you fall down on your knees and worship me. Nick shook his head, wanting to step away from that awful drop, afraid the shape would stretch out its black arms and push him over the edge.

Why don’t you speak? Why do you just shake your head?

In the dream Nick made the gesture he had made so many times in the waking world: a laying of his finger over his lips, then the flat of his hand against his throat… and then he heard himself say in a perfectly clear, rather beautiful voice: “I can’t talk. I am mute.”

But you can. If you want to, you can.

Nick reached out to touch the shape then, his fear momentarily swept away in a flood of amazement and burning joy. But as his hand neared that figure’s shoulder it turned ice cold, so cold it seemed that he had burned it. He jerked it away with ice crystals forming on the knuckles. And it came to him. He could hear. The dark shape’s voice; the far-off cry of a hunting night-bird; the endless whine of the wind. He was struck mute all over again by the wonder of it. There was a new dimension to the world he had never missed because he had never experienced it, and now it had fallen into place. He was hearing sounds. He seemed to know what each was without being told. They were pretty. Pretty sounds. He ran his fingers back and forth across his shirt and marveled at the swift whisper of his nails on the cotton.

Then the dark man was turning toward him, and Nick was terribly afraid. This creature, whatever it was, performed no free miracles.

–if you fall down on your knees and worship me.

And Nick put his hands over his face because he wanted all the things the black manshape had shown him from this high desert place: cities, women, treasure, power. But most of all he wanted to hear the entrancing sound his fingernails made on his shirt, the tick of a clock in an empty house after midnight, and the secret sound of rain.

But the word he said was No and then that freezing cold was on him again and he had been pushed, he was falling end over end, screaming soundlessly as he tumbled through these cloudy depths, tumbled into the smell of—

–corn?

Yes, corn. This was the other dream, they blended together like this, with hardly a seam to show the difference. He was in the corn, the green corn, and the smell was summer earth and cow manure and growing things. He got to his feet and began to walk up the row he had found himself in, stopping momentarily as he realized he could hear the soft whicker of the wind flowing between the July corn’s green, swordlike blades… and something else.

Music?

Yes—some sort of music. And in the dream he thought, “So that’s what they mean.” It was coming from straight ahead and he walked toward it, wanting to see if this particular succession of pretty sounds came from what was called “piano” or “horn” or “cello” or what.

The hot smell of summer in his nostrils, the overarching blue sky above, that lovely sound. In this dream, Nick had never been happier. And as he neared the source, a voice joined the music, an old voice like dark leather, slurring the words a little as if the song was a stew, often reheated, that never lost its old savor. Mesmerized, Nick walked toward it.

I come to the garden alone

While the dew is still on the roses

And the voice I hear, falling on my ear

The son… of God… disclo-o-ses

And he walks with me and he talks with me

Tells me I am his own

And the joy we share as we tarry there

None other… has ever… known.

As the verse ended, Nick pushed through to the head of the row and there in the clearing was a shack, not much more than a shanty, with a rusty trash barrel to the left and an old tire swing to the right. It hung from an apple tree that was gnarled but still green with lovely life. A porch slanted out from the house, a splintery old thing held up with old, oil-clotted jacklifters. The windows were open, and the kind summer breeze blew ragged white curtains in and out of them. From the roof a peaked chimney of galvanized tin, dented and smoky, jutted at its own old, odd angle. This house sat in its clearing and the corn stretched away in all four directions as far as the eye could see; it was broken only on the north by a dirt road that dwindled away to a point on the flat horizon. It was always then that Nick knew where he was: Polk County, Nebraska, west of Omaha and a little north of Osceola. Far up that dirt road was US 30 and Columbus sitting on the north bank of the Platte.

Sitting on the porch is the oldest woman in America, a black woman with fluffy white thin hair—she is thin herself, wearing a housedress and specs. She looks thin enough for the high afternoon wind to just blow her away, tumble her into the high blue sky and carry her perhaps all the way to Julesburg, Colorado. And the instrument she is playing (perhaps that’s what is holding her down, keeping her on the earth) is a “guitar,” and Nick thinks in the dream: That’s what a “guitar” sounds like. Nice. He feels he could just stand where he is for the rest of the day, watching the old black woman sitting on her porch held up by jacklifters in the middle of all this Nebraska corn, stand here west of Omaha and a little north of Osceola in the county of Polk, listening. Her face is seamed with a million wrinkles like the map of a state where the geography hasn’t settled down—rivers and canyons along her brown leather cheeks, ridges below the knob of her chin, the sinuous raised drumlin of bone at the base of her forehead, the caves of her eyes.

She has begun to sing again, accompanying herself on the old guitar.

Jee-sus, won’t you kun-bah-yere

Oh Jee-sus, won’t you kun-bah-yere,

Jesus, won’t you come by here?

Cause now… is the needy time

Oh now… is the needy time

Now is the—

Say, boy, who nailed you to that spot?

She puts the guitar across her lap like a baby and gestures him forward. Nick comes. He says he just wanted to listen to her sing, the singing was beautiful.

Well, singing’s God’s foolishness, I do it most the day now… how you making out with that black man?

He scares me. I’m afraid —

Boy, you got to be afraid. Even a tree at dusk, if you see it the right way, you got to be afraid. We’re all mortal, praise God.

But how do I tell him no? How do I —

How do you breathe? How do you dream? No one knows. But you come see me. Anytime. Mother Abagail is what they call me. I’m the oldest woman in these parts, I guess, and I still make m’own biscuit. You come see me anytime, boy, and bring your friends.

But how do I get out of this?

God bless you, boy, no one ever does. You just look up to the best and come see Mother Abagail anytime you take a mind to. I be right here, I guess; don’t move around much anymore. So you come see me. I be right —

–here, right here —

He came awake bit by bit until Nebraska was gone, and the smell of the corn, and Mother Abagail’s seamed, dark face. The real world filtered in, not so much replacing that dream world as overlaying it until it was out of sight.

He was in Shoyo, Arkansas, his name was Nick Andros, he had never spoken nor heard the sound of a “guitar”… but he was still alive.

He sat up on the cot, swung his legs over, and looked at the scrape. The swelling had gone down some. The ache was only a throb. I’m healing, he thought with great relief. I think I’m going to be okay.

He got up from the cot and limped over to the window in his shorts. The leg was stiff, but it was the kind of stiffness you know will work out with a little exercise. He looked out at the silent town, not Shoyo anymore but the corpse of Shoyo, and knew he would have to leave today. He wouldn’t be able to get far, but he would make a start.

Where to go? Well, he supposed he knew that. Dreams were just dreams, but for a start he supposed he could go northwest. Toward Nebraska.

Nick pedaled out of town at about quarter past one on the afternoon of July 3. He packed a knapsack in the morning, putting in some more of the penicillin pills in case he needed them, and some canned goods. He went heavy on the Campbell’s tomato soup and the Chef Boy-ar-dee ravioli, two of his favorites. He put in several boxes of bullets for the pistol and took a canteen.

He walked up the street, looking in garages until he found what he wanted: a ten-speed bike that was just about right for his height. He pedaled carefully down Main Street, in a low gear, his hurt leg slowly warming to the work. He was moving west and his shadow followed him, riding its own black bike. He went past the gracious, cool-looking houses on the outskirts of town, standing in the shade with their curtains drawn for all time.

He camped that night in a farmhouse ten miles west of Shoyo. By nightfall on July 4 he was nearly to Oklahoma. That evening before he went to sleep he stood in another farmyard, his face turned up to the sky, watching a meteor shower scratch the night with cold white fire. He thought he had never seen anything so beautiful. Whatever lay ahead, he was glad to be alive.

Chapter 41

Larry woke up at half past eight to sunlight and the sound of birds. They both freaked him out. Every morning since they had left New York City, sunlight and the sound of birds. And as an extra added attraction, a Bonus Free Gift, if you like, the air smelled clean and fresh. Even Rita had noticed it. He kept thinking: Well, that’s as good as it’s going to get. But it kept getting better. It got better until you wondered what they had been doing to the planet. And it made you wonder if this was the way the air had always smelled in places like upstate Minnesota and in Oregon and on the western slope of the Rockies.

Lying in his half of the double sleeping bag under the low canvas roof of the two-man tent they had added to their traveling kit in Passaic on the morning of July 2, Larry remembered when Al Spellman, one of the Tattered Remnants, had tried to persuade Larry to go on a camping trip with him and two or three other guys. They were going to go east, stop in Vegas for a night, then go on to a place called Loveland, Colorado. They were going to camp out in the mountains above Loveland for five days or so.

“You can leave all that ‘Rocky Mountain High’ shit for John Denver,” Larry had scoffed. “You’ll all come back with mosquito bites and probably with a good case of poison ivy up the kazoo from shitting in the woods. Now, if you change your mind and decide to camp out at the Dunes in Vegas for five days, give me a jingle.”

But maybe it had been like this. On your own, with nobody hassling you (except for Rita, and he guessed he could put up with her hassle), breathing good air and sleeping at night with no tossing and turning, just bang, fast asleep, like somebody had hit you on the head with a hammer. No problems, except which way you were going tomorrow and how much time you could make. It was pretty wonderful.

And this morning in Bennington, Vermont, now headed due east along Highway 9, this morning was something special. It was the by-God Fourth of July, Independence Day.

He sat up in the sleeping bag and looked over at Rita, but she was still out like a light, nothing showing but the lines of her body under the bag’s quilted fabric and a fluff of her hair. Well, he would wake her up in style this morning.

Larry unzipped his side of the bag and got out, buck naked. For a moment his flesh marbled into goosebumps and then the air felt naturally warm, probably seventy already. It was going to be another peach of a day. He crawled out of the tent and stood up.

Parked beside the tent was a 1200-cc Harley-Davidson cycle, black and chrome. Like the sleeping bag and the tent, it had been acquired in Passaic. By that time they had already gone through three cars, two blocked by terrible traffic jams, the third stuck in the mud outside of Nutley when he had tried to swing around a two-truck smashup. The bike was the answer. It could be trundled around accidents, pulling itself along in low gear. When the traffic was seriously piled up it could be ridden along the breakdown lane or the sidewalk, if there was one. Rita didn’t like it—riding pillion made her nervous and she clung to Larry desperately—but she had agreed it was the only practical solution. Mankind’s final traffic jam had been a dilly. And since they had left Passaic and gotten into the country, they had made great time. By the evening of July 2 they had recrossed into New York State and had pitched their tent on the outskirts of Quarryville, with the hazed and mystic Catskills to the west. They turned east on the afternoon of the third, crossing into Vermont just as dusk fell. And here they were in Bennington.

They had camped on a rise outside of town, and now as Larry stood naked beside the cycle, urinating, he could look down and marvel at the picture postcard New England town below him. Two clean white churches, their steeples rising as if to poke through the blue morning sky; a private school, gray fieldstone buildings shackled with ivy; a mill; a couple of red brick school buildings; plenty of trees dressed in summer green-gowns. The only thing that made the picture subtly wrong was the lack of smoke from the mill and the number of twinkling toy cars parked at weird angles on the main street, which was also the highway they were following. But in the sunny silence (silent, that was, except for an occasional twittering bird), Larry might have echoed the sentiments of the late Irma Fayette, had he known the lady: no great loss.

Except it was the Fourth of July, and he supposed he was still an American.

He cleared his throat, spat, and hummed a little to find his pitch. He drew breath, very much aware of the light morning breeze on his naked chest and buttocks, and burst into song.

Oh! say, can you see,

by the dawn’s early light,

What so proudly we hailed,

at the twilight’s last gleaming…

He sang it all the way through, facing Bennington, doing a little burlesque bump and grind at the end, because by now Rita would be standing at the flap of the tent, smiling at him.

He finished with a snappy salute at the building he thought might be the Bennington courthouse, then turned around, thinking the best way to start another year of independence in the good old U.S. of A. would be with a good old all-American fuck.

“Larry Underwood, Boy Patriot, wishes you a very good m—”

But the tent-flap was still closed, and he felt a momentary irritation with her again. He squashed it resolutely. She couldn’t be on his wavelength all the time. That’s all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship. He had been trying very hard with Rita since that harrowing experience in the tunnel, and he thought he’d been doing pretty well.

You had to put yourself in her place, that was the thing. You had to recognize that she was a lot older, she had been used to having things a certain way for most of her life. It was natural for her to have a harder job adapting to a world that had turned itself upside down. The pills, for instance. He hadn’t been overjoyed to discover that she had brought her whole fucking pharmacy along with her in a jelly jar with a screw-on lid. Yellowjackets, Quaaludes, Darvon, and some other stuff that she called “my little pick-me-ups.” The little pick-me-ups were reds. Three of those with a shot of tequila and you would jitter and jive all the live-long day. He didn’t like it because too many ups and downs and all-arounds added up to one mean monkey on your back. A monkey roughly the size of King Kong. And he didn’t like it because, when you got right down to where the cheese binds, it was a kind of slap in the face at him, wasn’t it? What did she have to be nervous about? Why should she have trouble dropping off at night? He sure as hell didn’t. And wasn’t he taking care of her? You were damned tooting he was.

He went back to the tent, then hesitated for a moment. Maybe he ought to let her sleep. Maybe she was worn out. But…

He looked down at Old Sparky, and Old Sparky didn’t really want to let her sleep. Singing the old Star-Speckled Banana had turned him right on. So Larry turned back the tent-flap and crawled in.

“Rita?”

And it hit him right away after the fresh morning cleanness of the air outside; he must have been mostly asleep before to have missed it. The smell was not overpoweringly strong because the tent was fairly well ventilated, but it was strong enough: the sweet-sour smell of vomit and sickness.

“Rita?” He felt mounting alarm at the still way she was lying, just that dry fluff of her hair sticking out of the sleeping bag. He crawled toward her on his hands and knees, the smell of vomit stronger now, making his stomach knot. “Rita, you all right? Wake up, Rita!”

No movement.

So he rolled her over and the sleeping bag was halfway unzipped as if she had tried to struggle out of it in the night, maybe realizing what was happening to her, struggling and failing, and he all the time sleeping peacefully beside her, old Mr. Rocky Mountain High himself. He rolled her over and one of her pill bottles fell out of her hand and her eyes were cloudy dull marbles behind half-closed lids and her mouth was filled with the green puke she had strangled on.

He stared into her dead face for what seemed a very long time. They were almost nose to nose, and the tent seemed to be getting hotter and hotter until it was like an attic on a late August afternoon just before the cooling thundershowers hit. His head seemed to be swelling and swelling. Her mouth was full of that shit. He couldn’t take his eyes off that. The question that ran around and around in his brain like a mechanical rabbit on a dogtrack rail was: How long was I sleeping with her after she died? Repulsive, man. Reeee -pulsive.

The paralysis broke and he scrambled out of the tent, scraping both knees when they came off the groundsheet and onto the naked earth. He thought he was going to puke himself and he struggled with it, willing himself not to, he hated to puke worse than anything, and then he thought But I was going back in there to FUCK her, man! and everything came up in a loose rush and he crawled away from the steaming mess crying and hating the cruddy taste in his mouth and nose.

He thought about her most of the morning. He felt a measure of relief that she had died—a great measure, actually. He would never tell anyone that. It confirmed everything his mother had said about him, and Wayne Stukey, and even that silly bit of fluff with the apartment near Fordham University. Larry Underwood, the Fordham Flasher.

“I ain’t no nice guy,” he said aloud, and having said it, he felt better. It became easier to tell the truth, and truth-telling was the most important thing. He had made an agreement with himself, in whatever back room of the subconscious where the Powers Behind the Throne wheel and deal, that he was going to take care of her. Maybe he wasn’t no nice guy, but he was no murderer either and what he had done in the tunnel was pretty close to attempted murder. So he was going to take care of her, he wasn’t going to shout at her no matter how pissed he got sometimes—like when she grabbed him with her patented Kansas City Clutch as they mounted the Harley—he wasn’t going to get mad no matter how much she held him back or how stupid she could be about some things. The night before last she had put a can of peas in the coals of their fire without ventilating the top and he had fished it out all charred and swelled, about three seconds before it would have gone off like a bomb, maybe blinding them with flying hooks of tin shrapnel. But had he read her out about it? No. He hadn’t. He had made a light joke and passed it off. Same with the pills. He had figured the pills were her business.

Maybe you should have discussed it with her. Maybe she wanted you to.

“It wasn’t a friggin encounter session,” he said aloud. It was survival. And she hadn’t been able to cut it. Maybe she had known it, ever since the day in Central Park when she had taken a careless shot at a chinaberry tree with a cheap-looking .32 that might have blown up in her hand. Maybe—

“Maybe, shit! ” Larry said angrily. He tipped the canteen up to his mouth but it was empty and he still had that slimy taste in his mouth. Maybe there were people like her all over the country. The flu didn’t just leave survivor types, why the hell should it? There might be a young guy somewhere in the country right now, perfect physical condition, immune to the flu but dying of tonsillitis. As Henny Youngman might have said, “Hey, folks, I got a million of em.”

Larry was sitting on a paved scenic turnout just off the highway. The view of Vermont marching away to New York in the golden morning haze was breathtaking. A sign announced that this was Twelve-Mile Point. Actually Larry thought he could see a lot farther than twelve miles. On a clear day you could see forever. At the far side of the turnout there was a knee-high rock wall, the rocks cemented together, and a few smashed Budweiser bottles. Also a used condom. He supposed that high school kids used to come up here at twilight and watch the lights come on in the town below. First they would get exalted and then they would get laid. BID, as they used to say: big fucking deal.

So why was he feeling so bad, anyway? He was telling the truth, wasn’t he? Yes. And the worst of the truth was that he felt relief, wasn’t it? That the stone around his neck was gone?

No, the worst is being alone. Being lonely.

Corny but true. He wanted someone to share this view with. Someone he could turn to and say with modest wit: On a clear day you can see forever. And the only company was in a tent a mile and a half back with a mouthful of green puke. Getting stiff. Drawing flies.

Larry put his head on his knees and closed his eyes. He told himself he wouldn’t cry. He hated to cry almost as bad as he hated to puke.

In the end he was chicken. He couldn’t bury her. He summoned up the worst thoughts he could—maggots and beetles, the woodchucks that would smell her and come in for a munch, the unfairness of one human being leaving another like a candy wrapper or a discarded Pepsi can. But there also seemed to be something vaguely illegal about burying her and to tell the truth (and he was telling the truth now, wasn’t he?), that was just a cheap rationalization. He could face going down to Bennington and breaking into the Ever Popular hardware store, taking the Ever Popular spade and a matching Ever Popular pick; he could even face coming back up here where it was still and beautiful and digging the Ever Popular grave near the Ever Popular Twelve-Mile Point. But to go back into that tent (which would now smell very much like the comfort station on Transverse Number One in Central Park, where the Ever Popular dark sweet treat would be sitting for eternity) and unzip her side of the sleeping bag the rest of the way and pull out her stiff and baggy body and drag it up to the hole by the armpits and tumble it in and then shovel the dirt over it, watching the earth patter on her white legs with their bulging nodules of varicose veins and stick in her hair…

Uh-uh, buddy. Guess I’ll sit this one out. If I’m a chicken, so be it. Plucka-plucka-plucka.

He went back to where the tent was pitched and turned back the flap. He found a long stick. He took a deep breath of fresh air, held it, and hooked his clothes out with the stick. Backed away with them, put them on. Took another deep breath, held it, and used the stick to fish out his boots. He sat on a fallen tree and put them on, too.

The smell was in his clothes.

“Bullshit,” he whispered.

He could see her, half in and half out of the sleeping bag, her stiff hand held out and still curled around the pill bottle that was no longer there. Her half-lidded eyes seemed to be staring at him accusingly. It made him think of the tunnel again, and his visions of the walking dead. Quickly he used the stick to close the tent-flap.

But he could still smell her on him.

So he made Bennington his first stop after all, and in the Bennington Men’s Shop he stripped off all his clothes and got new ones, three changes plus four pairs of socks and shorts. He even found a new pair of boots. Looking at himself in the three-way mirror he could see the empty store spread out behind him and the Harley leaning raffishly at the curb.

“Sharp threads,” he murmured. “Heavy-heavy.” But there was no one to admire his taste.

He left the store and gunned the Harley into life. He supposed he should stop at the hardware store and see if they had a tent and another sleeping bag, but all he wanted now was to get out of Bennington. He would stop farther up the line.

He looked up toward where the land made its slow rise as he guided the Harley out of town, and he could see Twelve-Mile Point, but not where they had pitched the tent. That was really all for the best, it was—

Larry looked back at the road and terror jumped nimbly down his throat. An International-Harvester pickup towing a horsetrailer had swerved to avoid a car and the horsetrailer had overturned. He was going to drive the Harley right into it because he hadn’t been looking where he was going.

He turned hard right, his new boot dragging on the road, and he almost got around. But the left footrest clipped the trailer’s rear bumper and yanked the bike out from under him. Larry came to rest on the highway’s verge with a bone-rattling thump. The Harley chattered on for a moment behind him and then stalled out.

“You all right?” he asked aloud. Thank God he’d only been doing twenty or so. Thank God Rita wasn’t with him, she’d be bullshit out of her mind with hysterics. Of course if Rita had been with him he wouldn’t have been looking up there in the first place, he would have been TCB, taking care of business to the cubistic among you.

“I’m all right,” he answered himself, but he still wasn’t sure he was. He sat up. The quiet impressed itself upon him as it did from time to time—it was so quiet that if you thought about it you could go crazy. Even Rita bawling would have been a relief at this point. Everything seemed suddenly full of bright twinkles, and with sudden horror he thought he was going to pass out. He thought, I really am hurt, in just a minute I’ll feel it, when the shock wears off, that’s when I’ll feel it, I’m cut bad or something, and who’s going to put on a tourniquet?

But when the instant of faintness had passed, he looked at himself and thought he was probably all right after all. He had cut both hands and his new pants had shredded away at the right knee—the knee was also cut—but they were all just scrapes and what the fuck was the big deal, anybody could dump their cycle, it happens to everybody once in a while.

But he knew what the big deal was. He could have hit his head the right way and fractured his skull and he would have lain there in the hot sun until he died. Or strangled to death on his own puke like a certain now-deceased friend of his.

He walked shakily over to the Harley and stood it up. It didn’t seem to be damaged in any way, but it looked different. Before, it had just been a machine, a rather charming machine that could serve the dual purpose of transporting him and making him feel like James Dean or Jack Nicholson in Hell’s Angels on Wheels. But now its chrome seemed to grin at him like a sideshow barker, seeming to invite him to step right up and see if he was man enough to ride the two-wheeled monster.

It started on the third kick, and he putted out of Bennington at no more than walking speed. He was wearing bracelets of cold sweat on his arms and suddenly he had never, no never, in his whole life wanted so badly to see another human face.

But he didn’t see one that day.

In the afternoon he made himself speed up a little, but he could not force himself to twist the throttle any farther once the speedometer needle had reached twenty, not even if he could see the road was clear ahead. There was a sporting goods and cycle shop on the outskirts of Wilmington, and he stopped there and got a sleeping bag, some heavy gloves, and a helmet, and even with the helmet on he could not force himself to go faster than twenty-five. On blind corners he slowed down until he was walking the big cycle along. He kept having visions of lying unconscious at the side of the road and bleeding to death unattended.

At five o’clock, as he was approaching Brattleboro, the Harley’s overheat light went on. Larry parked it and turned it off with mingled feelings of relief and disgust.

“You might as well have pushed it,” he said. “It’s meant to run at sixty, you goddam fool!”

He left it and walked into town, not knowing if he would come back for it.

He slept on the Brattleboro Municipal Common that evening, under the partial shelter of the bandshell. He turned in as soon as it was dark, and fell asleep instantly. Some sound woke him with a jerk a time later. He looked at his watch. The thin radium lines on the dial scratched out eleven-twenty. He got up on one elbow and stared into the darkness, feeling the bandshell huge around him, missing the little tent that had held in body heat. What a fine little canvas womb it had been!

If there had been a sound, it was gone now; even the crickets had fallen silent. Was that right? Could it be right?

“Is someone there?” Larry called, and the sound of his own voice frightened him. He groped for the .30-.30 and for a long and increasingly panicky moment could not find it. When he did, he squeezed the trigger without thinking, just as a man drowning in the ocean will squeeze a thrown life preserver. If the safety hadn’t been on, he would have fired it. Possibly into himself.

There was something in the silence, he was sure of it. Perhaps a person, perhaps some large and dangerous animal. Of course, a person could be dangerous, too. A person like the one who had repeatedly stabbed the poor monster-shouter or like John Bearsford Tipton, who had offered him a million in cold cash for the use of his woman.

“Who is it?”

He had a flashlight in his pack, but in order to hunt for it, he would have to let go of the rifle, which he had drawn across his lap: Besides… did he really want to see who it was?

So he just sat there, willing movement or a repetition of the sound which had awakened him (had it been a sound? or just something he had dreamed?), and after a little while he first nodded, then dozed off.

Suddenly his head jerked up, his eyes wide, his flesh shrinking against his bones. Now there was sound, and if the night hadn’t been cloudy, the moon, nearly full, would have shown him—

But he didn’t want to see. No, he most definitely didn’t want to see. Yet he sat forward, head cocked, listening to the sound of dusty bootheels clocking away from him down the sidewalk of Main Street, Brattleboro, Vermont, moving west, fading, until they were lost in the open hum of things.

Larry felt a sudden mad urge to stand up, letting the sleeping bag slither down around his ankles, to shout: Come back, whoever you are! I don’t care! Come back! But did he really want to issue such a blank check to Whoever? The bandshell would amplify his shout—his plea. And what if those bootheels actually did return, growing louder in a stillness where not even the crickets sang?

Instead of standing, he lay back down and curled up in the fetal position with his hands wrapped around the rifle. I won’t sleep again tonight, he thought, but he was asleep in three minutes and quite sure the next morning that he had dreamed the whole thing.

Chapter 42

While Larry Underwood was taking his Fourth of July spill only a state away, Stuart Redman was sitting on a large rock at the side of the road and eating his lunch. He heard the sound of approaching engines. He finished his can of beer at a swallow and carefully folded over the top of the waxed-paper tube the Ritz crackers were in. His rifle was leaning against the rock beside him. He picked it up, flicked off the safety catch, and then put it down again, a little closer to hand. Motorcycles coming, small ones by the sound. Two-fifties? In this great stillness it was impossible to tell how far away they were. Ten miles, maybe, but only maybe. Plenty of time to eat more if he wanted to, but he didn’t. In the meantime, the sun was warm and the thought of meeting fellow creatures pleasant. He had seen no living people since leaving Glen Bateman’s house in Woodsville. He glanced at the rifle again. He had flicked the safety because the fellow creatures might turn out to be like Elder. He had left the rifle leaning against the rock because he hoped they would be like Bateman—only not quite so glum about the future. Society will reappear, Bateman had said. Notice I didn’t use the word “reform.” That would have been a ghastly pun. There’s precious little reform in the human race.

But Bateman himself hadn’t wanted to get in on the ground floor of society’s reappearance. He seemed perfectly content—at least for the time being—to go for his walks with Kojak, paint his pictures, putter around his garden, and think about the sociological ramifications of nearly total decimation.

If you come back this way and renew your invitation to “jine up,” Stu, I’ll probably agree. That is the curse of the human race. Sociability. What Christ should have said was “Yea, verily, whenever two or three of you are gathered together, some other guy is going to get the living shit knocked out of him.” Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society.” Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

Was that true? If it was, then God help them. Just lately Stu had been thinking a great deal about old friends and acquaintances. In his memory there was a great tendency to downplay or completely forget their unlovable characteristics—the way Bill Hapscomb used to pick his nose and wipe the snot on the sole of his shoe, Norm Bruett’s heavy hand with his kids, Billy Verecker’s unpleasant method of controlling the cat population around his house by crushing the thin skulls of the new kittens under the heels of his Range Rider boots.

The thoughts that came wanted to be wholly good. Going hunting at dawn, bundled up in quilted jackets and Day-Glo orange vests. Poker games at Ralph Hodges’s house and Willy Craddock always complaining about how he was four dollars in the game, even if he was twenty ahead. Six or seven of them pushing Tony Leominster’s Scout back onto the road that time he went down into the ditch drunk out of his mind, Tony staggering around and swearing to God and all the saints that he had swerved to avoid a U-Haul full of Mexican wetbacks. Jesus, how they had laughed. Chris Ortega’s endless stream of ethnic jokes. Going down to Huntsville for whores, and that time Joe Bob Brentwood caught the crabs and tried to tell everybody they came from the sofa in the parlor and not from the girl upstairs. They had been goddam good times. Not what your sophisticates with their nightclubs and their fancy restaurants and their museums would think of as good times, maybe, but good times just the same. He thought about those things, went over them and over them, the way an old recluse will lay out hand after hand of solitaire from a greasy pack of cards. Mostly he wanted to hear other human voices, get to know someone, be able to turn to someone and say, Did you see that? when something happened like the meteor shower he had watched the other night. He was not a talkative man, but he did not care much for being alone, and never had.

So he sat up a little straighter when the motorcycles finally swept around the bend, and he saw they were a couple of Honda 250s, ridden by a boy of about eighteen and a girl who was maybe older than the boy. The girl was wearing a bright yellow blouse and light blue Levi’s.

They saw him sitting on the rock, and both Hondas swerved a little as their drivers’ surprise caused control to waver briefly. The boy’s mouth dropped open. For a moment it was unclear whether they would stop or just speed by heading west.

Stu raised an empty hand and said “Hi!” in an amiable voice. His heart was beating heavily in his chest. He wanted them to stop. They did.

For a moment he was puzzled by the tenseness in their postures. Particularly the boy; he looked as if a gallon of adrenaline had just been dumped into his blood. Of course Stu had a rifle, but he wasn’t holding it on them and they were armed themselves; he was wearing a pistol and she had a small deer-rifle slung across her back on a strap, like an actress playing Patty Hearst with no great conviction.

“I think he’s all right, Harold,” the girl said, but the boy she called Harold continued to stand astride his bike, looking at Stu with an expression of surprise and considering antagonism.

“I said I think—” she began again.

“How are we supposed to know that?” Harold snapped without taking his eyes off Stu.

“Well, I’m glad to see you, if that makes any difference,” Stu said.

“What if I don’t believe you?” Harold challenged, and Stu saw that he was scared green. Scared by him and by his responsibility to the girl.

“Well, then, I don’t know.” Stu climbed off the rock. Harold’s hand jittered toward his holstered pistol.

“Harold, you leave that alone,” the girl said. Then she fell silent and for a moment they all seemed helpless to proceed further—a group of three dots which, when connected, would form a triangle whose exact shape could not yet be foreseen.

“Ouuuu,” Frannie said, easing herself down on a mossy patch at the base of an elm beside the road. “I’m never going to get the calluses off my fanny, Harold.”

Harold uttered a surly grunt.

She turned to Stu. “Have you ever ridden a hundred and seventy miles on a Honda, Mr. Redman? Not recommended.”

Stu smiled. “Where are you headed?”

“What business is it of yours?” Harold asked rudely.

“And what kind of attitude is that?” Fran asked him. “Mr. Redman is the first person we’ve seen since Gus Dinsmore died! I mean, if we didn’t come looking for other people, what did we come for?”

“He’s watching out for you, is all,” Stu said quietly. He picked a piece of grass and put it between his lips.

“That’s right, I am,” Harold said, unmollified.

“I thought we were watching out for each other,” she said, and Harold flushed darkly.

Stu thought: Give me three people and they’ll form a society. But were these the right two for his one? He liked the girl, but the boy impressed him as a frightened blowhard. And a frightened blowhard could be a very dangerous man, under the right circumstances… or the wrong ones.

“Whatever you say,” Harold muttered. He shot Stu a lowering look and took a box of Marlboros from his jacket pocket. He lit one. He smoked on it like a fellow who had only recently taken up the habit. Like maybe the day before yesterday.

“We’re going to Stovington, Vermont,” Frannie said. “To the plague center there. We—what’s wrong? Mr. Redman?” He had gone pale all of a sudden. The stem of grass he had been chewing fell onto his lap.

“Why there?” Stu asked.

“Because there happens to be an installation there for the studying of communicable diseases,” Harold said loftily. “It was my thought that, if there is any order left in this country, or any persons in authority who escaped the late scourge, they would likely be at Stovington or Atlanta, where there is another such center.”

“That’s right,” Frannie said.

Stu said: “You’re wasting your time.”

Frannie looked stunned. Harold looked indignant; the red began to creep out of his collar again. “I hardly think you’re the best judge of that, my man.”

“I guess I am. I came from there.”

Now they both looked stunned. Stunned and astonished.

“You knew about it?” Frannie asked, shaken. “You checked it out?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. It—”

“You’re a liar!” Harold’s voice had gone high and squeaky.

Fran saw an alarming cold flash of anger in Redman’s eyes, then they were brown and mild again. “No. I ain’t.”

“I say you are! I say you’re nothing but a—”

“Harold, you shut up! ”

Harold looked at her, wounded. “But Frannie, how can you believe—”

“How can you be so rude and antagonistic?” she asked hotly. “Will you at least listen to what he has to say, Harold?”

“I don’t trust him.”

Fair enough, Stu thought, that makes us even.

“How can you not trust a man you just met? Really, Harold, you’re being disgusting!”

“Let me tell you how I know,” Stu said quietly. He told an abridged version of the story that began when Campion had crashed into Hap’s pumps. He sketched his escape from Stovington a week ago. Harold glared dully down at his hands, which were plucking up bits of moss and shredding them. But the girl’s face was like an unfolding map of tragic country, and Stu felt bad for her. She had set off with this boy (who, to give him credit, had had a pretty good idea), hoping against hope that there was something of the old taken-for-granted ways left. Well, she had been disappointed. Bitterly so, from her look.

“Atlanta too? The plague got both of them?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, and she burst into tears.

He wanted to comfort her, but the boy would not take to that. Harold glanced uncomfortably at Fran, then down at the litter of moss on his cuffs. Stu gave her his handkerchief. She thanked him distractedly, without looking up. Harold glared sullenly at him again, the eyes those of a piggy little boy who wants the whole cookie jar to himself. Ain’t he going to be surprised, Stu thought, when he finds out a girl isn’t a jar of cookies.

When her tears had tapered down to sniffles, she said, “I guess Harold and I owe you our thanks. At least you saved us a long trip with disappointment at the end.”

“You mean you believe him? Just like that? He tells you a big story and you just… you buy it?”

“Harold, why would he lie? For what gain?”

“Well, how do I know what he’s got on his mind?” Harold asked truculently. “Murder, could be. Or rape.”

“I don’t believe in rape myself,” Stu said mildly. “Maybe you know something about it I don’t.”

“Stop it,” Fran said. “Harold, won’t you try not to be so awful?”

“Awful? ” Harold shouted. “I’m trying to watch out for you—us—and that’s so bloodydamn awful? ”

“Look,” Stu said, and brushed his sleeve up. On the inside of his elbow were several healing needle marks and the last remains of a discolored bruise. “They injected me with all kinds of stuff.”

“Maybe you’re a junkie,” Harold said.

Stu rolled his sleeve back down without replying. It was the girl, of course. He had gotten used to the idea of owning her. Well, some girls could be owned and some could not. This one looked like the later type. She was tall and pretty and very fresh-looking. Her dark eyes and hair accentuated a look that could be taken for dewy helplessness. It would be easy to miss that faint line (the I-want line, Stu’s mother had called it) between her eyebrows that became so pronounced when she was put out, the swift capability of her hands, even the forthright way she tossed her hair from her forehead.

“So now what do we do?” she asked, ignoring Harold’s last contribution to the discussion entirely.

“Go on anyway,” Harold said, and when she looked over at him with that line furrowing her brow, he added hastily: “Well, we have to go somewhere. Sure, he’s probably telling the truth, but we could double-check. Then decide what’s next.”

Fran glanced at Stu with an I-don’t-want-to-hurt-your-feelings-but kind of expression. Stu shrugged.

“Okay?” Harold pressed.

“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” Frannie said. She picked up a gone-to-seed dandelion and blew away the fluff.

“You didn’t see anyone at all back the way you came?” Stu asked.

“There was a dog that seemed to be all right. No people.”

“I saw a dog, too.” He told them about Bateman and Kojak. When he had finished he said, “I was going toward the coast, but you saying there aren’t any people back that way kind of takes the wind out of my sails.”

“Sorry,” Harold said, sounding anything but. He stood up. “Ready, Fran?”

She looked at Stu, hesitated, then stood up. “Back to the wonderful diet machine. Thank you for telling us what you know, Mr. Redman, even if the news wasn’t so hot.”

“Just a second,” Stu said, also standing up. He hesitated, wondering again if they were right. The girl was, but the boy surely was seventeen and afflicted with a bad case of the I-hate-most-everybodies. But were there enough people left to pick and choose? Stu thought not.

“I guess we’re both looking for people,” he said. “I’d like to tag along with you, if you’d have me.”

“No,” Harold said instantly.

Fran looked from Harold to Stu, troubled. “Maybe we—”

“You never mind. I say no.”

“Don’t I get a vote?”

“What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see he only wants one thing? Christ, Fran!”

“Three’s better than two if there’s trouble,” Stu said, “and I know it’s better than one.”

“No,” Harold repeated. His hand dropped to the butt of his gun.

“Yes,” Fran said. “We’d be glad to have you, Mr. Redman.”

Harold rounded on her, his face angry and hurt. Stu tightened for just a moment, thinking that perhaps he was going to strike her, and then relaxed again. “That’s the way you feel, is it? You were just waiting for some excuse to get rid of me, I get it.” He was so angry that tears had sprung to his eyes, and that made him angrier still. “If that’s the way you want it, okay. You go on with him. I’m done with you.” He stamped off toward where the Hondas were parked.

Frannie looked at Stu with stricken eyes, then turned toward Harold.

“Just a minute,” Stu said. “Stay here, please.”

“Don’t hurt him,” Fran said. “Please.”

Stu trotted toward Harold, who was astride his Honda and trying to start it up. In his anger he had twisted the throttle all the way over and it was a good thing for him it was flooded, Stu thought; if it actually started up with that much throttle, it would rear back on its rear wheel like a unicycle and pile old Harold into the first tree and land on top of him.

“You stay away!” Harold screamed angrily at him, and his hand fell onto the butt of the gun again. Stu put his hand on top of Harold’s, as if they were playing slapjack. He put his other hand on Harold’s arm. Harold’s eyes were very wide, and Stu believed he was only an inch or so from becoming dangerous. He wasn’t just jealous of the girl, that had been a bad oversimplification on his part. His personal dignity was wrapped up in it, and his new image of himself as the girl’s protector. God knew what kind of a fuckup he had been before all of this, with his wad of belly and his pointy-toed boots and his stuck-up way of talking. But underneath the new image was the belief that he was still a fuckup and always would be. Underneath was the certainty that there was no such thing as a fresh start. He would have reacted the same way to Bateman, or to a twelve-year-old kid. In any triangle situation he was going to see himself as the lowest point.

“Harold,” he said, almost into Harold’s ear.

“Let me go.” His heavy body seemed light in its tension; he was thrumming like alive wire.

“Harold, are you sleeping with her?”

Harold’s body gave a shivering jerk and Stu knew he was not.

“None of your business!”

“No. Except to get things out where we can see them. She’s not mine, Harold. She’s her own. I’m not going to try to take her away from you. I’m sorry to have to speak so blunt, but it’s best for us to know where we stand. We’re two and one now and if you go off, we’re two and one again. No gain.”

Harold said nothing, but his trembling hand subsided.

“I’ll be just as plain as I have to,” Stu went on, still speaking very nearly into Harold’s ear (which was clotted with brown wax), and taking the trouble to speak very, very calmly. “You know and I know that there’s no need for a man to be rapin women. Not if he knows what to do with his hand.”

“That’s—” Harold licked his lips and then looked over at the side of the road where Fran was still standing, hands cupping elbows, arms crossed just below her breasts, watching them anxiously. “That’s pretty disgusting.”

“Well maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but when a man’s around a woman who doesn’t want him in bed, that man’s got his choice. I pick the hand every time. I guess you do too since she’s still with you of her own free will. I just want to speak plain, between you and me. I’m not here to squeeze you out like some bully at a country fair dance.”

Harold’s hand relaxed on the gun and he looked at Stu. “You mean that? I… you promise you won’t tell?”

Stu nodded.

“I love her,” Harold said hoarsely. “She doesn’t love me, I know that, but I’m speaking plainly, like you said.”

“That’s best. I don’t want to cut in. I just want to come along.”

Compulsively, Harold repeated: “You promise?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“All right.”

He got slowly off the Honda. He and Stu walked back to Fran.

“He can come,” Harold said. “And I…” He looked at Stu and said with difficult dignity, “I apologize for being such an asshole.”

“Hooray!” Fran said, and clapped her hands. “Now that that’s settled, where are we going?”

In the end they went in the direction Fran and Harold had been headed in, west. Stu said he thought Glen Bateman would be glad to have them overnight, if they could reach Woodsville by dark—and he might agree to tag along with them in the morning (at this Harold began to glower again). Stu drove Fran’s Honda, and she rode pillion behind Harold. They stopped in Twin Mountain for lunch and began the slow, cautious business of getting to know each other. Their accents sounded funny to Stu, the way they broadened their a’s and dropped or modified their r’s. He supposed he sounded just as funny to them, maybe funnier.

They ate in an abandoned lunchroom and Stu found his gaze was drawn again and again to Fran’s face—her lively eyes, the small but determined set of her chin, the way that line formed between her eyes, indexing her emotions. He liked the way she looked and talked; he even liked the way her dark hair was drawn back from her temples. And that was the beginning of his knowing that he did want her, after all.