The Stand

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, stu

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 interco

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 pla

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, gri

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 ru

“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 ru

Lloyd gri

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 ru