Stephen King - The Stand

They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over.

“Are we changing?” Stu asked quietly.

“Yes,” Glen answered. “Yes, I think we are.”

“We’ve dropped some weight,” Ralph said. “I know that just looking at you guys. And me, I used to have a helluva beergut. Now I can look down and see my toes again. In fact, I can see just about my whole feet.”

“It’s a state of mind,” Larry said suddenly. When they looked at him he seemed a trifle embarrassed but went on: “I’ve had this feeling for the last week or so, and I couldn’t understand it. Maybe now I can. I’ve been feeling high. Like I’d done half a joint of really dynamite grass or snorted just a touch of coke. But there’s none of the disorienting feeling that goes with dope. You do some dope and you feel like normal thinking is lust a little bit out of your grasp. I feel like I’m thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high.” Larry laughed. “Maybe it’s just hunger.”

“Hunger’s part of it,” Glen agreed, “but not all of it.”

“Me, I’m hungry all the time,” Ralph said, “but it doesn’t seem too important. I feel good.”

“I do too,” Stu said. “Physically, I haven’t felt this good in years.”

“When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there,” Glen said. “The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It’s a whole-body, whole-mind enema.”

“You got such a fancy way of puttin things, baldy.”

“It may be inelegant, but it’s accurate.”

Ralph asked, “Will it help us with him ?”

“Well,” Glen said, “that’s what it’s for. I don’t have much doubt about that. But we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”

They walked on. Kojak came out of the brush and walked with them for a while, his toenails clicking on the pavement of US 70. Larry reached down and ruffled his fur. “Ole Kojak,” he said. “Did you know you were a battery? Just one great big old Delco battery with a lifetime guarantee?”

Kojak didn’t appear to know or care, but he wagged his tail to show he was on Larry’s side.

They camped that night about fifteen miles west of Sego, and as if to drive home the point of what they had been talking about in the afternoon, there was nothing to eat for the first time since they had left Boulder. Glen had the last of their instant coffee in a Glad Bag, and they shared it out of a single mug, passing it from hand to hand. They had come the last ten miles without seeing a single car.

The next morning, the twenty-second, they came upon an overturned Ford station wagon with four corpses in it—two of them little children. There were two boxes of animal crackers in the car, and a large bag of stale potato chips. The animal crackers were in better shape. They shared them out five ways.

“Don’t wolf them, Kojak,” Glen admonished. “Bad dog! Where are your manners? And if you have no manners—as I must now conclude—where is your savoir faire ?”

Kojak thumped his tail and eyed the animal crackers in a way which showed pretty conclusively that he had no more savoir faire than he did manners.

“Then root, hog, or die,” Glen said, and gave the dog the last of his own share—a tiger. Kojak wolfed it down and then went sniffing off.

Larry had saved his entire menagerie—about ten animals—to eat at once. He did so slowly and dreamily. “Did you ever notice,” he said, “that animal crackers have a faint, lemony undertaste? I remember that from being a kid. Never noticed it again until now.”

Ralph had been tossing his last two crackers from hand to hand, and now he gobbled one. “Yeah, you’re right. They do have sort of a lemon taste to em. You know, I kind of wish ole Nicky was here. I wouldn’t mind sharing these old animal crackers a little further.”

Stu nodded. They finished the animal crackers and went on. That afternoon they found a Great Western Markets delivery truck, apparently bound for Green River, pulled neatly over in the breakdown lane, the driver sitting bolt upright and dead behind the wheel. They lunched on a canned ham from the back, but none of them seemed to want much. Glen said their stomachs had shrunk. Stu said the ham smelled bad to him—not spoiled, just too rich. Too meaty . It kind of turned his stomach. He could only bring himself to eat a single slice. Ralph said he would have just as soon had two or three more boxes of animal crackers, and they all laughed. Even Kojak ate only a small serving before going off to investigate some scent.

They camped east of Green River that night, and there was a dust of snow in the early morning hours.

They came to the washout a little past noon on the twenty-third. The sky had been overcast all day, and it was cold—cold enough to snow, Stu thought—and not just flurries, either.

The four of them stood on the edge, Kojak at Glen’s heel, looking down and across. Somewhere north of here a dam might have given way, or there might have been a succession of hard summer rainstorms. Whatever, there had been a flash flood along the San Rafael, which was only a dry-wash in some years. It had swept away a great thirty-foot slab of I-70. The gully was about fifty feet deep, the banks crumbly, rubbly soil and sedimentary rock. At the bottom was a sullen trickle of water.

“Holy crow,” Ralph said. “Somebody oughtta call the Utah State Highway Department about this.”

Larry pointed. “Look over there,” he said. They looked out into the emptiness, which was now beginning to be dotted with strange, wind-carved pillars and monoliths. About one hundred yards down the course of the San Rafael they saw a tangle of guardrails, cable, and large slabs of asphalt-composition paving. One chunk stuck up toward the cloudy, racing sky like an apocalyptic finger, complete with white broken passing line.

Glen was looking down into the rubble-strewn cut, hands stuffed into his pockets, an absent, dreaming look on his face. In a low voice, Stu said: “Can you make it, Glen?”

“Sure, I think so.”

“How’s that arthritis?”

“It’s been worse.” He cracked a smile. “But in all honesty, it’s been better, too.”

They had no rope with which to anchor each other. Stu went down first, moving carefully. He didn’t like the way the ground sometimes shifted under his feet, starting little slides of rock and dirt. Once he thought his footing was going to go out from under him completely, sending him sliding all the way to the bottom on his can. One groping hand caught a solid rock outcropping and he hung on for dear life, finding more solid ground for his feet. Then Kojak was bounding blithely past him, kicking up little puffs of dirt and sending down only small runnels of earth. A moment later he was standing on the bottom, wagging his tail and barking amiably up at Stu.

“Fucking showoff dog,” Stu growled, and carefully made his way to the bottom.

“I’m coming next,” Glen called. “I heard what you said about my dog!”

“Be careful, baldy! Be damn careful! It’s really loose underfoot.”

Glen came down slowly, moving with great deliberation from one hold to the next. Stu tensed every time he saw loose dirt start to slide out from underneath Glen’s battered Georgia Giants. His hair blew like fine silver around his ears in the light breeze that had sprung up. It occurred to him that when he had first met Glen, painting a mediocre picture beside the road in New Hampshire, Glen’s hair had still been salt-and-pepper.

Until the moment Glen finally planted his feet on the level ground of the mudflat at the bottom of the gully, Stu was sure he was going to fall and break himself in two. Stu sighed with relief and clapped him on the shoulder.