Stephen King - The Stand

When it was done, a moment of sanity had come back. A moment of choice. He had stared around wonderingly at the helicopters parked in the echoing hangar and then down at his hands. They smelled like a roll of burned caps. But this was not Powtanville. There were no helicopters in Powtanville. The Indiana sun did not shine with the savage brilliance of this sun. He was in Nevada. Carley and his pool-hall buddies were dead. Dead of the superflu.

Trash had turned around and looked doubtfully at his handiwork. What was he doing, sabotaging the dark man’s equipment? It was senseless, insane. He would undo it, and quickly.

Oh, but the lovely explosions.

The lovely fires .

Flaming jet fuel streaming everywhere. Helicopters exploding out of the air. So beautiful.

And he had suddenly thrown his new life away. He had trotted back to his sand-crawler, a furtive grin on his sun-blackened face. He had gotten in and had driven away… but not too far away. He had waited, and finally a fuel truck had come out of the motor pool garage and had trundled across the tarmac like a large olive-drab beetle. And when it blew, exploding greasy fire in every direction, Trash had dropped his fieldglasses and had bellowed at the sky, shaking his fists in inarticulate joy. But the joy had not lasted long. It had been replaced by deadly terror and sick, mourning sorrow.

He had driven northwest into the desert, pushing the sand-crawler along at near-suicidal speeds. How long ago? He didn’t know. If he had been told that this was the sixteenth of September, he would only have nodded in a total blank lack of understanding.

He thought he would kill himself, that there was nothing else left for him, every hand was turned against him now, and that was just as it was supposed to be. When you bit the hand that fed you, you expected that extended hand to curl into a fist. That wasn’t only the way life went; that was justice. He had three large cans of gasoline in the back of the track. He would pour it all over himself and then strike a match. It was what he deserved.

But he hadn’t done it. He didn’t know why. Some force, more powerful than the agony of his remorse and loneliness, had stopped him. It seemed that even burning himself to death like a Buddhist monk was not penance enough. He had slept. And when he awoke, he discovered that a new thought had crept into his brain as he slept, and that thought was:

REDEMPTION .

Was it possible? He didn’t know. But if he found something… something big … and brought it to the dark man in Las Vegas, might it not be possible? And even if REDEMPTION was impossible, perhaps ATONEMENT was not. If it was true, there was still a chance he could die content.

What? What could it be? What was big enough for REDEMPTION , or even for ATONEMENT ? Not landmines or a fleet of flametracks, not grenades or automatic weapons. None of those things were big enough. He knew where there were two large experimental bombers (they had been built without congressional knowledge, paid for out of blind defense funds), but he could not get them back to Vegas, and even if he could, there was no one there who could fly them. From the looks of them, they crewed at least ten, maybe more.

He was like an infrared scope that senses heat in darkness and reveals those heat sources as vague red-devil shapes. He was able, in some strange way, to sense the things that had been left behind in this wasteland, where so many military projects had been carried out. He could have gone straight west, straight to Project Blue, where the whole thing had begun. But cold plague was not to his taste, and in his confused but not entirely illogical way, he thought it would not be to Flagg’s taste, either. Plague didn’t care who it killed. It might have been better for the human race if the original funders of Project Blue had kept that simple fact in mind.

So he had gone northwest from Indian Springs, into the sandy desolation of the Nellis Air Force Range, stopping his crawler when he had to cut through high barbed-wire fences marked with signs that read—US GOVERNMENT PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING and ARMED SENTRIES and GUARD DOGS and THERE IS A HIGH-VOLTAGE CHARGE PASSING THROUGH THESE WIRES. But the electricity was dead, like the guard dogs and the armed sentries, and Trashcan Man drove on, correcting his course from time to time. He was being drawn, drawn to something. He didn’t know what it was, but he thought it was big. Big enough.

The crawler’s Goodyear balloon tires rolled steadily on, carrying Trash through dry washes and up slopes so rocky that they looked like half-exposed stegosaurus spines. The air hung still and dry. The temperature hovered at just above 100. The only sound was the drone of the crawler’s modified Studebaker engine.

He topped a knoll, saw what was below, and threw the transmission into neutral for a moment to get a better look.

There was a huddled complex of buildings down there, shimmering through the rising heat like quicksilver. Quonset huts and low cinderblock. Vehicles stalled here and there on dusty streets. The whole area was surrounded by three courses of barbed wire, and he could see the porcelain conductors along the wire. These were not the small conductors the size of a knuckle that passed along a weak stay-away charge; these were the giant ones, the size of a closed fist.

From the east, a paved two-lane road led to a guardhouse that looked like a reinforced pillbox. No cute little signs here saying CHECK YOUR CAMERA WITH MP ON DUTY or IF YOU LIKED US, TELL YOUR CONGRESSMAN. The only sign in evidence was red on yellow, the colors of danger, curt and to the point: PRESENT IDENTIFICATION IMMEDIATELY.

“Thank you,” Trashcan whispered. He had no idea who he was thanking. “Oh thank you… thank you.” His special sense had led him to this place, but he had known it was here all along. Somewhere.

He put the sandtrack in its forward gear and lurched down the slope. Ten minutes later he was nosing up the access road to the guardhouse. There were black-and-white-striped crash barriers across the road, and Trash got out to examine them. Places like this had big generators to make sure there was plenty of emergency power. He doubted if any generator would have gone on supplying power for three months, but he would still have to be very careful and make sure everything was blown before going in. What he wanted was now very near at hand. He wouldn’t allow himself to become overeager and get cooked like a roast in a microwave oven.

Behind six inches of bulletproof glass, a mummy in an army uniform stared out and beyond him.

Trash ducked under the crash barrier on the ingress side of the guardhouse and approached the door of the little concrete building. He tried it and it opened. That was good. When a place like this had to switch over to emergency power, everything was supposed to lock automatically. If you were taking a crap, you got locked in the bathroom until the crisis was over. But if the emergency power failed, everything unlocked again.

The dead sentry had a dry, sweet, interesting smell, like cinnamon and sugar mixed together for toast. He had not bloated or rotted; he had simply dried up. There were still black discolorations under his neck, the distinctive trademark of Captain Trips. Standing in the corner behind him was a Browning automatic rifle. Trashcan Man took it and went back outside.

He set the BAR for single fire, fiddled with the sight, and then socked it into the hollow of his scrawny right shoulder. He sighted down on one of the porcelain conductors and squeezed off a shot. There was a loud hand-clapping sound and an exciting whiff of cordite. The conductor exploded every which way, but there was no purple-white glare of high-voltage electricity. Trashcan Man smiled.