The Stand

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 co

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 gri