Stephen King - The Stand

Humming, he walked over to the gate and examined it. Like the guardhouse door, it was unlocked. He pushed it open a little way and then hunkered down. There was a pressure mine here under the paving. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did know. It might be armed; it might not be.

He went back to the sandtrack, put it in gear, and drove it through the crash barriers. They broke off with a snapping, grinding sound and the crawler’s big balloon tires rolled over them. The desert sun pounded down. Trashcan Man’s peculiar eyes sparkled happily. In front of the gate, he got out of the sandtrack and then put it in gear again. The driverless track rolled forward and pushed the gate all the way open. Trashcan Man darted into the guardhouse.

He squinched his eyes shut, but there was no explosion. That was good; they really had shut down completely. Their emergency systems might have run a month, perhaps even two, but in the end the heat and lack of regular maintenance had killed them. Still, he would be careful.

Meanwhile, his sandtrack was rolling serenely toward the corrugated wall of a long Quonset hut. Trashcan Man trotted onto the base after it and caught up with it just as it was bumping over the curb of what a sign announced was Illinois Street. He put it back into neutral, and the sandtrack stopped. He got in, reversed, and drove around to the front of the Quonset.

It was a barracks. The shadowy interior was filled with that sugar-and-cinnamon smell. There were perhaps twenty soldiers scattered among the fifty or so beds. Trashcan Man walked up the aisle between them, wondering where he was going. There was nothing in here for him, was there? These men had once been weapons of a sort, but they had been neutralized by the flu.

But there was something at the very rear of the building that interested him. A sign. He walked up to read it. The heat in here was tremendous. It made his head thump and swell. But when he stood in front of the sign, he began to smile. Yes, it was here. Somewhere on this base was what he had been looking for.

The sign showed a cartoon man in a cartoon shower. He was soaping his cartoon genitals busily; they were almost entirely covered with a drift of cartoon bubbles. The caption beneath read: REMEMBER ! IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO SHOWER DAILY!

Below that was a yellow-and-black emblem that showed three triangles pointed downward.

The symbol for radiation.

Trashcan Man laughed like a child and clapped his hands in the stillness.

Whitney Horgan found Lloyd in his room, lying on the big round bed he had most recently shared with Dayna Jurgens. There was a large gin and tonic balanced on his bare chest. He was staring solemnly up at his reflection in the overhead mirror.

“Come on in,” he said when he saw Whitney. “Don’t stand on ceremony, for Chrissake. Don’t bother to knock. Bastard.” It came out as bassard .

“You drunk, Lloyd?” Whitney asked cautiously.

“Nope. Not yet. But I’m gettin there.”

“Is he here?”

“Who? Fearless Leader?” Lloyd sat up. “He’s around someplace. The Midnight Rambler.” He laughed and lay back down.

Whitney said in a low voice, “You want to watch what you’re saying. You know it’s not a good idea to hit the hard stuff when he’s—”

“Fuck it.”

“Remember what happened to Hec Drogan. And Strellerton.”

Lloyd nodded. “You’re right. The walls have ears. The fucking walls have ears. You ever hear that saying?”

“Yeah, once or twice. It’s a true saying around here, Lloyd.”

“You bet.” Lloyd suddenly sat up and threw his drink across the room. The glass shattered. “There’s one for the sweeper, right, Whitney?”

“You okay, Lloyd?”

“I’m all right. You want a gin and tonic?”

Whitney hesitated for a moment. “Naw. I don’t like them without the lime.”

“Hey, Jesus, don’t say no just because of that! I got lime. Comes out of a little squeeze bottle.” Lloyd went over to the bar and held up a plastic ReaLime. “Looks just like the Green Giant’s left testicle. Funny, huh?”

“Does it taste like lime?”

“Sure,” Lloyd said morosely. “What do you think it tastes like? Fuckin Cheerios? So what do you say? Be a man and have a drink with me.”

“Well… okay.”

“We’ll have them by the window and take in the view.”

“No,” Whitney said, harshly and abruptly. Lloyd paused on his way to the bar, his face suddenly paling. He looked toward Whitney, and for a moment their eyes met.

“Yeah, okay,” Lloyd said. “Sorry, man. Poor taste.”

“That’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay, and both of them knew it. The woman Flagg had introduced as his “bride” had taken a high dive the day before. Lloyd remembered Ace High saying that Dayna couldn’t jump from the balcony because the windows didn’t open. But the penthouse had a sundeck. Guess they must have thought none of the real high rollers—Arabs, most of them—would ever take the dive. A lot they knew.

He fixed Whitney a gin and tonic and they sat and drank in silence for a while. Outside, the sun was going down in a red glare. At last Whitney said in a voice almost too low to be heard: “Do you really think she went on her own?”

Lloyd shrugged. “What does it matter? Sure. I think she dived. Wouldn’t you, if you was married to him ? You ready?”

Whitney looked at his glass and saw with some surprise that he was indeed ready. He handed it to Lloyd, who took it over to the bar. Lloyd was pouring the gin freehand, and Whitney had a nice buzz on.

Again they drank in silence for a while, watching the sun go down.

“What do you hear about that guy Cullen?” Whitney asked finally.

“Nothing. Doodley-squat. El-zilcho. I don’t hear nothing, Barry don’t hear nothing. Nothing from Route 40, from Route 30, from Route 2 and 74 and I-15. Nothing from the back roads. They’re all covered and they’re all nothing. He’s out in the desert someplace, and if he keeps moving at night and if he can figure out how to keep moving east, he’s going to slip through. And what does it matter, anyhow? What can he tell them?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either. Let him go, that’s what I say.”

Whitney felt uncomfortable. Lloyd was getting perilously close to criticizing the boss again. His buzz-on was stronger, and he was glad. Maybe soon he would find the nerve to say what he had come here to say.

“I’ll tell you something,” Lloyd said, leaning forward. “He’s losing his stuff. You ever hear that fucking saying? It’s the eighth inning and he’s losing his stuff and there’s no-fucking-body warming up in the bullpen.”

“Lloyd, I—”

“You ready?”

“Sure, I guess.”

Lloyd made them new drinks. He handed one to Whitney, and a little shiver went through him as he sipped. It was almost raw gin.

“Losing his stuff,” Lloyd said, returning to his text. “First Dayna, then this guy Cullen. His own wife—if that’s what she was—goes and takes a dive. Do you think her double-fucking-gainer from the penthouse balcony was in his game plan?”

“We shouldn’t be talking about it.”

“And Trashcan Man. Look what that guy did all by himself. With fiends like that, who needs enemas? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“Lloyd—”

Lloyd was shaking his head. “I don’t understand it at all. Everything was going so good, right up to the night he came and said the old lady was dead over there in the Free Zone. He said the last obstacle was out of our way. But that’s when things started to get funny.”

“Lloyd, I really don’t think we should be—”