Stephen King - The Stand

The three of them camped sixteen miles west of the place where they had left Stu. They had come to another washout, this one minor. The real reason they had made such poor mileage was because some of the heart seemed to have gone out of them. It was hard to tell if it was going to come back. Their feet seemed to weigh more. There was little conversation. Not one of them wanted to look into the face of another, for fear of seeing his own guilt mirrored there.

They camped at dark and built a scrub fire. There was water, but no food. Glen tamped the last of his tobacco into his pipe, and wondered suddenly if Stu had any cigarettes. The thought spoiled his own taste for tobacco, and he knocked his pipe out on a rock, absently kicking away the last of his Borkum Riff. When an owl hooted somewhere out in the darkness a few minutes later, he looked around.

“Say, where’s Kojak?” he asked.

“Now, that’s kinda funny, ain’t it?” Ralph said. “I can’t remember seeing him the last couple of hours at all.”

Glen got to his feet. “Kojak!” he yelled. “Hey, Kojak! Kojak! ” His voice echoed lonesomely away into the wastes. There was no answering bark. He sat down again, overcome with gloom. A soft sighing noise escaped him. Kojak had followed him almost all the way across the continent. Now he was gone. It was like a terrible omen.

“You s’pose something got him?” Ralph asked softly.

Larry said in a quiet, thoughtful voice: “Maybe he stayed with Stu.”

Glen looked up, startled. “Maybe,” he said, considering it. “Maybe that’s what happened.”

Larry tossed a pebble from one hand to the other, back and forth, back and forth. “He said maybe God would send a raven to feed him. I doubt if there’s any out here, so maybe He sent a dog instead.”

The fire made a popping sound, sending a column of sparks up into the darkness to whirl in brief brightness and then to wink out.

When Stu saw the dark shape come slinking down the gully toward him, he pulled himself up against the nearby boulder, leg sticking out stiffly in front of him, and found a good-sized stone with one numb hand. He was chilled to the bone. Larry had been right. Two or three days of lying around in these temperatures was going to kill him quite efficiently. Except now it looked like whatever this was would get him first. Kojak had remained with him until sunset and then had left him, scrambling easily out of the gully. Stu had not called him back. The dog would find his way back to Glen and go on with them. Perhaps he had his own part to play. But now he wished that Kojak had stayed a little longer. The pills were one thing, but he had no wish to be ripped to pieces by one of the dark man’s wolves.

He gripped the rock harder and the dark shape paused about twenty yards up the cut. Then it started coming again, a blacker shadow in the night.

“Come on, then,” Stu said hoarsely.

The black shadow wagged its tail and came. “ Kojak? ”

It was. And there was something in his mouth, something he dropped at Stu’s feet. He sat down, tail thumping, waiting to be complimented.

“ Good dog ,” Stu said in amazement. “ Good dog!”

Kojak had brought him a rabbit.

Stu pulled out his pocket knife, opened it, and disemboweled the rabbit in three quick movements. He picked up the steaming guts and tossed them to Kojak. “Want these?” Kojak did. Stu skinned the rabbit. The thought of eating it raw didn’t do much for his stomach.

“Wood?” he said to Kojak without much hope. There were scattered branches and hunks of tree all along the banks of the gully, dropped by the flash flood, but nothing within reach.

Kojak wagged his tail and didn’t move.

“Fetch? F—”

But Kojak was gone. He whirled, streaked to the east side of the gully, and ran back with a large piece of deadwood in his jaws. He dropped it beside Stu, and barked. His tail wagged rapidly.

“Good dog,” Stu said again. “I’ll be a sonofabitch! Fetch, Kojak!”

Barking with joy, Kojak went again. In twenty minutes, he had brought back enough wood for a large fire. Stu carefully stripped enough splinters to make kindling. He checked the match situation and saw that he had a book and a half. He got the kindling going on the second match and fed the fire carefully. Soon there was a respectable blaze going and Stu got as close to it as he could, sitting in his sleeping bag. Kojak lay down on the far side of the fire with his nose on his paws.

When the fire had burned down a little, Stu spitted the rabbit and cooked it. The smell was soon strong enough and savory enough to have his stomach rumbling. Kojak came to attention and sat watching the rabbit with close interest.

“Half for you and half for me, big guy, okay?”

Fifteen minutes later he pulled the rabbit off the fire and managed to rip it in half without burning his fingers too badly. The meat was burned in places, half-raw in others, but it put the canned ham from Great Western Markets in the shade. He and Kojak gulped it down… and as they were finishing, a bone-chilling howl drifted down the wash.

“ Christ! ” Stu said around a mouthful of rabbit.

Kojak was on his feet, hackles up, growling. He advanced stiff-legged around the fire and growled again. Whatever had howled fell silent.

Stu lay down, the hand-sized stone by one hand and his opened pocket knife by the other. The stars were cold and high and indifferent. His thoughts turned to Fran and he turned them away just as quickly. That hurt too much, full belly or not. I won’t sleep , he thought . Not for a long time .

But he did sleep, with the help of one of Glen’s pills. And when the coals of the fire had burned down to embers, Kojak came over and slept next to him, giving Stu his heat. And that was how, on the first night after the party was broken, Stu ate when the others went hungry, and slept easy while their sleep was broken by bad dreams and an uneasy feeling of rapidly approaching doom.

On the twenty-fourth, Larry Underwood’s group of three pilgrims made thirty miles and camped northeast of the San Rafael Knob. That night the temperature slid down into the mid-twenties, and they built a large fire and slept dose by it. Kojak had not rejoined them.

“What do you think Stu’s doing tonight?” Ralph asked Larry.

“Dying,” Larry said shortly, and was sorry when he saw the wince of pain on Ralph’s homely, honest face, but he didn’t know how to redeem what he had said. And after all, it was almost surely true.

He lay down again, feeling strangely certain that it was tomorrow. Whatever they were coming to, they were almost there.

Bad dreams that night. He was on tour with an outfit called the Shady Blues Connection in the one he remembered most clearly on waking. They were booked into Madison Square Garden, and the place was sold out. They took the stage to thunderous applause. Larry went to adjust his mike, bring it down to proper height, and couldn’t budge it. He went to the lead guitarist’s mike, but that one was frozen, too. Bass guitarist, organist, same thing. Booing and rhythmic clapping began to come from the crowd. One by one, the members of the Shady Blues Connection slunk off the stage, grinning furtively into high psychedelic shirt-collars like the ones the Byrds used to wear back in 1966, when Roger McGuinn was still eight miles high. Or eight hundred. And still Larry wandered from mike to mike, trying to find at least one he could adjust. But they were all at least nine feet tall and frozen solid. They looked like stainless steel cobras. Someone in the crowd began to yell for “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” I don’t do that number anymore , he tried to say. I stopped doing that one when the world ended . They couldn’t hear him, and a chant began to arise, starting in the back rows, then sweeping the Garden, gaining strength and volume: “ Baby Can You Dig Your Man! Baby Can You Dig Your Man! BABY CAN YOU DIG YOUR MAN! ”