Stephen King - The Stand

He touched her cheek again. She moaned like a hurt animal.

Lloyd licked his dry lips. “I’ll push off now, if that’s okay.”

“Fine, Lloyd, fine.” The dark man did not look around; he was staring raptly into Nadine’s face. “Everything is going well. Very well.”

Lloyd left as quickly as he could, almost running. In the elevator it all caught up with him and he had to push the EMERGENCY STOP button as hysterics overwhelmed him. He laughed and cried for nearly five minutes. When the storm had passed, he felt a little better.

He’s not falling apart , he told himself. There are a few little problems, but he’s on top of them. The ballgame will probably be over by the first of October, and surely by the fifteenth. Everything’s starting to go good, just like he said, and never mind that he almost killed me… never mind that he seems stranger than ever…

Lloyd got the call from Stan Bailey at Indian Springs fifteen minutes later. Stan was nearly hysterical between his fury at Trash and his fear of the dark man.

Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson had taken off from the Springs at 6:02 P.M. to run a recon mission east of Vegas. One of their other trainee pilots, Cliff Benson, had been riding with Carl as an observer.

At 6:12 P.M. both helicopters had blown up in the air. Stunned though he had been, Stan had sent five men over to Hangar 9, where two other skimmers and three large Baby Huey copters were stored. They found explosive taped to all five of the remaining choppers, and incendiary fuses rigged to simple kitchen timers. The fuses were not the same as the ones Trash had rigged to the fuel trucks, but they were very similar. There was not much room for doubt.

“It was the Trashcan Man,” Stan said. “He went hogwild. Jesus Christ only knows what else he’s wired up to explode out here.”

“Check everything,” Lloyd said. His heartbeat was rapid and thready with fear. Adrenaline boiled through his body, and his eyes felt as if they were in danger of popping from his head. “Check everything ! You get every man jack out there and go from one end to the other of that cock-knocking base. You hear me, Stan?”

“Why bother?”

“ Why bother? ” Lloyd screamed. “Do I have to draw you a picture, shitheels? What’s the big dude gonna say if the whole base—”

“All our pilots are dead,” Stan said softly. “Don’t you get it, Lloyd? Even Cliff, and he wasn’t very fucking good. We’ve got six guys that aren’t even close to soloing and no teachers. What do we need those jets for now, Lloyd?”

And he hung up, leaving Lloyd to sit thunderstruck, finally realizing.

Tom Cullen woke up shortly after nine-thirty that evening, feeling thirsty and stiff. He had a drink from his water canteen, crawled out from under the two leaning rocks, and looked up at the dark sky. The moon rode overhead, mysterious and serene. It was time to go on. But he would have to be careful, laws yes.

Because they were after him now.

He had had a dream. Nick was talking to him and that was strange, because Nick couldn’t talk. He was M-O-O-N, that spelled deaf-mute. Had to write everything, and Tom could hardly read at all. But dreams were funny things, anything could happen in a dream, and in Tom’s, Nick had been talking.

Nick said, “They know about you now, Tom, but it wasn’t your fault. You did everything right. It was bad luck. So now you have to be careful. You have to leave the road, Tom, but you have to keep going east.”

Tom understood about east, but not how he was going to keep from getting mixed up in the desert. He might just go around in big circles.

“You’ll know,” Nick said. “First you have to look for God’s Finger…”

Now Tom put his canteen back on his belt and adjusted his pack. He walked back to the turnpike, leaving his bike where it had been. He climbed the embankment to the road and looked both ways. He scuttled across the median strip and after another cautious look, he trotted across the westbound lanes of I-15.

They know about you now, Tom .

He caught his foot in the guardrail cable on the far side and tumbled most of the way to the bottom of the embankment beside the highway. He lay in a heap for a moment, heart pounding. There was no sound but faint wind, whining over the broken floor of the desert.

He got up and began to scan the horizon. His eyes were keen and the desert air was crystal clear. Before long he saw it, standing out against the starstrewn sky like an exclamation point. God’s Finger. As he faced due east, the stone monolith was at ten o’clock. He thought he could walk to it in an hour or two. But the clear, magnifying quality of the air had fooled more experienced hikers than Tom Cullen, and he was bemused by the way the stone finger always seemed to remain the same distance away. Midnight passed, then two o’clock. The great clock of stars in the sky had revolved. Tom began to wonder if the rock that looked so much like a pointing finger might not be a mirage. He rubbed his eyes, but it was still there. Behind him, the turnpike had merged into the dark distance.

When he looked back at the Finger, it did seem to be a little closer, and by 4 A.M., when an inner voice began to whisper that it was time to find a good hiding place for the coming day, there could be no doubt that he had drawn nearer to the landmark. But he would not reach it this night.

And when he did reach it (assuming that they didn’t find him when day came)? What then?

It didn’t matter.

Nick would tell him. Good old Nick.

Tom couldn’t wait to get back to Boulder and see him, laws, yes.

He found a fairly comfortable spot in the shade of a huge spine of rock and went to sleep almost instantly. He had come about thirty miles northeast that night, and was approaching the Mormon Mountains.

During the afternoon, a large rattlesnake crawled in beside him to get out of the heat of the day. It coiled itself by Tom, slept awhile, and then passed on.

Flagg stood at the edge of the roof sundeck that afternoon, looking east. The sun would be going down in another four hours, and then the retard would be on the move again.

A strong and steady desert breeze lifted his dark hair back from his hot brow. The city ended so abruptly, giving up to the desert. A few billboards on the edge of nowhere, and that was it. So much desert, so many places to hide. Men had walked into that desert before and had never been seen again.

“But not this time,” he whispered. “I’ll have him. I’ll have him.”

He could not have explained why it was so important to have the retard; the rationality of the problem constantly eluded him. More and more he felt an urge to simply act, to move, to do . To destroy.

Last evening, when Lloyd had informed him of the helicopter explosions and the deaths of the three pilots, he had had to use every resource at his command to keep from going into an utter screaming rage. His first impulse had been to order an armored column assembled immediately—tanks, flametracks, armored trucks, the whole works. They could be in Boulder in five days. The whole stinking mess would be over in a week and a half.

Sure.

And if there was early snow in the mountains passes, that would be the end of the great Wehrmacht . And it was already September 14. Good weather was no longer a sure bet. How in hell’s name had it gotten so late so fast?

But he was the strongest man on the face of the earth, wasn’t he? There might be another like him in Russia or China or Iran, but that was a problem for ten years from now. Now all that mattered was that he was ascendant, he knew it, he felt it. He was strong, that was all the retard could tell them… if he managed to avoid getting lost in the desert or freezing to death in the mountains. He could only tell them that Flagg’s people lived in fear of the Walkin Dude and would obey the Walkin Dude’s least command. He could only tell them things that would demoralize their will further. So why did he have this steady, gnawing feeling that Cullen must be found and killed before he could leave the West?