The Stand   ::   King Stephen

And in time, someone will have to find the place where they made the germs like Captain Trips and fill that place up with dirt and seed the ground with salt and then pray over it. Pray for all of us.”

Much later that evening, not long before midnight, Stu pushed her down the silent hospital corridor in a wheelchair. Laurie Constable walked with them, and Fran had seen to it that Stu had made his appointment.

“You look like you’re the one that should be in that wheelchair, Stu Redman,” Laurie said.

“Right now it doesn’t bother me at all,” Stu said.

They came to a large glass window that looked in on a room done in blues and pinks. A large mobile hung from the ceiling. Only one crib was occupied, in the front row.

Stu stared in, fascinated.

GOLDSMITH-REDMAN, PETER, the card at the front of the crib read. BOY. B.W. 6 LB 9 OZ. M. FRANCES GOLDSMITH, RM. 209 F. JESSE RIDER (D.)

Peter was crying.

His small hands were balled into fists. His face was red. There was an amazing swatch of dark black hair on his head. His eyes were blue and they seemed to look directly into Stu’s eyes, as if accusing him of being the author of all his misery.

His forehead was creased with a deep vertical slash… an I-want line.

Frannie was crying again.

“Frannie, what’s wrong?”

“All those empty cribs,” she said, and her voice became a sob. “That’s what’s wrong. He’s all alone in there. No wonder he’s crying, Stu, he’s all alone. All those empty cribs, my God—”

“He won’t be alone for very long,” Stu said, and put an arm around her shoulders. “And he looks to me as if he’s going to bear up just fine. Don’t you think so, Laurie?”

But Laurie had left the two of them alone in front of the nursery window.

Wincing at the pain in his leg, Stu knelt beside Frannie and hugged her clumsily, and they looked in at Peter in mutual wonder, as if the child were the first that had ever been gotten upon the earth. After a bit Peter fell asleep, small hands clenched together on his chest, and still they watched him… and wondered that he should be there at all.



Chapter 78



Mayday

They had finally put the winter behind them.

It had been long, and to Stu, with his East Texas background, it had seemed fantastically hard. Two days after his return to Boulder, his right leg had been rebroken and reset and this time encased in a heavy plaster cast that had not come off until early April. By then the cast had begun to look like some incredibly complex roadmap; it seemed that everyone in the Zone had autographed it, although that was a patent impossibility. The pilgrims had begun to trickle in again by the first of March, and by the day that had been the cut-off for income tax returns in the old world, the Free Zone was nearly eleven thousand strong, according to Sandy DuChiens, who now headed a Census Bureau of a dozen persons, a bureau that had its own computer terminal at the First Bank of Boulder.

Now he and Fran stood with Lucy Swann in the picnic area halfway up Flagstaff Mountain and watched the Mayday Chase. All the Zone’s children appeared to be involved (and not a few of the adults). The original maybasket, bedecked with crepe ribbons and filled with fruit and toys, had been hung on Tom Cullen. It had been Fran’s idea.

Tom had caught Bill Gehringer (despite Billy’s self-conscious disclaimer that he was too old for such kid games, he had joined with a will), and together they had caught the Upshaw boy—or was it Upson? Stu had trouble keeping them all straight—and the three of them had tracked down Leo Rockway hiding behind Brentner Rock. Tom himself had put the tag on Leo.

The chase ranged back and forth over West Boulder, gangs of kids and adolescents surging up and down the streets that were still mostly empty, Tom bellowing and carrying his basket. And at last it led back up here, where the sun was hot and the wind blew warm. The band of tagged children was some two hundred strong, and they were still in the process of tracking down the last, half dozen or so that were still “out.” In the process they were scaring up dozens of deer that wanted no part of the game.

Two miles farther up, at Sunrise Amphitheater, a huge picnic lunch had been spread where Harold Lauder had once waited for just the right moment to speak into his walkie-talkie. At noon, two or three thousand people would sit down together and look east toward Denver and eat venison and deviled eggs and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and fresh pie for dessert. It might be the last mass gathering the Zone would ever have, unless they all went down to Denver and got together in the stadium where the Broncos had once played football. Now, on Mayday, the trickle of early spring had swelled to a flood of immigrants. Since April 15 another eight thousand had come in, and they were now nineteen thousand or so—temporarily at least, Sandy’s Census Bureau could not keep up. A day when only five hundred came in was a rare day.

In the playpen which Stu had brought up and covered with a blanket, Peter began to cry lustily. Fran moved toward him, but Lucy, mountainous and eight months pregnant, was there first.

“I warn you,” Fran said, “it’s his diapers. I can tell just by the way he sounds.”

“Looking at a little poo isn’t going to cross my eyes.” Lucy lifted an indignantly crying Peter from the playpen and shook him gently back and forth in the sunlight. “Hi, baby. What you doing? Not too much?”

Peter blatted.

Lucy set him down on another blanket they had brought up for a changing table. Peter began to crawl away, still blatting. Lucy turned him over and began to unsnap his blue corduroy pants. Peter’s legs waved in the air.

“Why don’t you two go for a walk?” Lucy said. She smiled at Fran, but Stu thought the smile was sad.

“Why don’t we do just that?” Fran agreed, and took Stu’s arm.

Stu allowed himself to be walked away. They crossed the road and entered a mild green pasture that climbed upward at a steep angle under the moving white clouds and bright blue sky.

“What was that about?” Stu asked.

“Pardon me?” But Fran looked just a trifle too innocent.

“That look.”

“What look?”

“I know a look when I see one,” Stu said. “I may not know what it means, but I know it when I see it.”

“Sit down with me, Stu.”

“Like that, is it?”

They sat down and looked east where the land fell away in a series of swoops to flatlands that faded into a blue haze. Nebraska was out there in that haze somewhere.

“It’s serious. And I don’t know how to talk to you about it, Stuart.”

“Well, you just go on the best you can,” he said, and took her hand.