Stephen King - The Stand

They had found the Wolfman just east of the Eisenhower Tunnel. The traffic was badly jammed up there, and the stink of death had been sickly potent. The Wolfman had been half in and half out of an Austin. He was wearing pegged jeans and a silk sequined Western shirt. The corpses of several wolves lay around the Austin. The Wolfman himself was half in and half out of the Austin’s passenger seat, and a dead wolf lay on his chest. The Wolfman’s hands were wrapped around the wolf’s neck, and the wolf’s bloody muzzle was angled up to the Wolfman’s neck. Reconstructing, it seemed to all of them that a pack of wolves had come down out of the higher mountains, had spotted this lone man, and had attacked. The Wolfman had had a gun. He had dropped several of them before retreating to the Austin.

How long before hunger had forced him from his refuge?

Larry didn’t know, didn’t want to know. But he had seen how terribly thin the Wolfman had been. A week, maybe. He had been going west, whoever he was, going to join the dark man, but Larry would not have wished such a dreadful fate on anyone. He had spoken of it once to Stu, two days after they had emerged from the tunnel, with the Wolfman safely behind them.

“Why would a bunch of wolves hang around so long, Stu?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, if they wanted something to eat, couldn’t they find it?”

“I’d think so, yeah.”

It was a dreadful mystery to him, and he kept working it over in his mind, knowing he would never find the solution. Whoever the Wolfman had been, he hadn’t been lacking in the balls department. Finally driven by hunger and thirst, he had opened the passenger door. One of the wolves had jumped him and torn his throat out. But the Wolfman had throttled it to death even as he himself died.

The four of them had gone through the Eisenhower Tunnel roped together, and in that horrible blackness, Larry’s mind had turned to the trip he had made through the Lincoln Tunnel. Only now it was not images of Rita Blakemoor that haunted him but the face of the Wolfman, frozen in its final snarl as he and the wolf had killed each other.

Were the wolves sent to kill that man?

But that thought was too unsettling to even consider. He tried to push the whole thing out of his mind and just keep walking, but that was a hard thing to do.

They made their camp that night beyond Loma, quite close to the Utah state line. Supper consisted of forage and boiled water, as all their meals did—they were following Mother Abagail’s instructions to the letter: Go in the clothes that you stand up in. Carry nothing.

“It’s going to get bad in Utah,” Ralph remarked. “I guess that’s where we’re going to find out if God really is watchin over us. There’s one stretch, better than a hundred miles, without a town or even a gas station and a café.” He didn’t seem particularly disturbed by the prospect.

“Water?” Stu asked.

Ralph shrugged. “Not much of that, either. Guess I’ll turn in.”

Larry followed suit. Glen stayed up to smoke a pipe. Stu had a few cigarettes and decided to have one. They smoked in silence for a while.

“Long way from New Hampshire, baldy,” Stu said at last.

“It isn’t exactly shouting distance from here to Texas.”

Stu smiled. “No. No, it ain’t.”

“You miss Fran a lot, I guess.”

“Yeah. Miss her, worry about her. Worry about the baby. It’s worse after it gets dark.”

Glen puffed. “That’s nothing you can change, Stuart.”

“I know. But I worry.”

“Sure.” Glen knocked out his pipe on a rock. “Something funny happened last night, Stu. I’ve been trying to figure out all day if it was real, or a dream, or what.”

“What was it?”

“Well, I woke up in the night and Kojak was growling at something. Must have been past midnight, because the fire had burned way down. Kojak was on the other side of it with his hackles standing up. I told him to shut up and he never even looked at me. He was looking over to my right. And I thought, What if it’s wolves? Ever since we saw that guy Larry calls the Wolfman—”

“Yeah, that was bad.”

“But there was nothing. I had a clear view. He was growling at nothing .”

“He had a scent, that’s all.”

“Yeah, but the crazy part is still to come. After a couple of minutes I started to feel… well, decidedly weird. I felt like there was something right over by the turnpike embankment, and that it was watching me. Watching all of us. I felt like I could almost see it, that if I squinted my eyes the right way, I would see it. But I didn’t want to. Because it felt like him .

“It felt like Flagg , Stuart.”

“Probably nothing,” Stu said after a moment.

“It sure felt like something. It felt like something to Kojak, too.”

“Well, suppose he was watching somehow? What could we do about it?”

“Nothing. But I don’t like it. I don’t like it that he’s able to watch us… if that’s what it is. It scares me shitless.”

Stu finished his cigarette, stubbed it out carefully on the side of a rock, but made no move toward his sleeping bag just yet. He looked at Kojak, who was lying by the campfire with his nose on his paws and watching them.

“So Harold’s dead,” Stu said at last.

“Yes.”

“And it was just a goddam waste. A waste of Sue and Nick. A waste of himself, too, I reckon.”

“I agree.”

There was nothing more to say. They had come upon Harold and his pitiful dying declaration the day after they had done the Eisenhower Tunnel. He and Nadine must have gone over Loveland Pass, because Harold still had his Triumph cycle—the remains of it, anyway—and as Ralph had said, it would have been impossible to get anything bigger than a kid’s little red wagon through the Eisenhower. The buzzards had worked him over pretty well, but Harold still clutched the Permacover notebook in one stiffening hand. The .38 was jammed in his mouth like a grotesque lollipop, and although they hadn’t buried Harold, Stu had removed the pistol. He had done it gently. Seeing how efficiently the dark man had destroyed Harold and how carelessly he had thrown him aside when his part was played out had made Stu hate Flagg all the more. It made him feel that they were throwing themselves away in a witless sort of children’s crusade, and while he felt that they had to press on, Harold’s corpse with the shattered leg haunted him the way the frozen grimace of the Wolfman haunted Larry. He had discovered he wanted to pay Flagg back for Harold as well as Nick and Susan… but he felt more and more sure that he would never get that chance.

But you want to watch out , he thought grimly. You want to look out if I get within choking distance of you, you freak .

Glen got up with a little wince. “I’m going to turn in, East Texas. Don’t beg me to stay. It really is a dull party.”

“How’s that arthritis?”

Glen smiled and said, “Not too bad,” but as he crossed to his bedroll he was limping.

Stu thought he should not have another cigarette—only smoking two or three a day would exhaust his supply by the end of the week—and then he lit one anyway. This evening it was not so cold, but for all that, there could be no doubt that in this high country, at least, summer was done. It made him feel sad, because he felt very strongly that he would never see another summer. When this one had begun, he had been an on-again, off-again worker at a factory that made pocket calculators. He had been living in a small town called Arnette, and he had spent a lot of his spare time hanging around Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco station, listening to the other guys shoot the shit about the economy, the government, hard times. Stu guessed that none of them had known what real hard times were. He finished his cigarette and tossed it into the campfire.