Stephen King - The Stand

He awoke with the chant in his ears. Sweat had popped out all over his body.

He didn’t need Glen to tell him what kind of dream that had been, or what it meant. The dream where you can’t reach the mikes, can’t adjust them, is a common one for rock musicians, just as common as dreaming that you’re on stage and can’t remember a single lyric. Larry guessed that all performers had a variation on one of those before—

Before a performance .

It was an inadequacy dream. It expressed that one simple overriding fear: What if you can’t? What if you want to, but you can’t? The terror of being unable to make the simple leap of faith which is the place where any artist—singer, writer, painter, musician—begins.

Make it nice for the people, Larry .

Whose voice was that? His mother’s?

You’re a taker, Larry .

No, Mom—no I’m not. I don’t do that number anymore. I stopped doing that one when the world ended. Honest .

He lay back down and drifted off to sleep again. His last thought was that Stu had been right: The dark man was going to grab them. Tomorrow , he thought. Whatever we’re coming to, we’re almost there .

But they saw no one on the twenty-fifth. The three of them walked stolidly along under the bright blue skies, and they saw birds and beasts in plenty, but no people.

“It’s amazing how rapidly the wildlife is coming back,” Glen said. “I knew it would be a fairly rapid process, and of course the winter is going to prune it back some, but this is still amazing. It’s only been about a hundred days since the first outbreaks.”

“Yeah, but there’s no dogs or horses,” Ralph said. “That just doesn’t seem right, you know it? They invented a bug that killed pretty near all the people, but that wasn’t enough. It had to take out his two favorite animals, too. It took man and man’s best friends.”

“And left the cats,” Larry said morosely.

Ralph brightened. “Well, there’s Kojak—”

“There was Kojak.”

That killed the conversation. The buttes frowned down at them, hiding places for dozens of men with rifles and scopes. Larry’s premonition that it was to be today hadn’t left him. Each time they topped a rise, he expected to see the road blocked below them. And each time it wasn’t, he thought about ambush.

They talked about horses. About dogs and buffalo. The buffalo were coming back, Ralph told them—Nick and Tom Cullen had seen them. The day was not so far off—in their lifetimes, maybe—when the buffalo might darken the plains again.

Larry knew it was the truth, but he also knew it was bushwa—their lifetimes might amount to no more than another ten minutes.

Then it was nearly dark, and time to look for a place to camp. They came to the top of one final rise and Larry thought: Now. They’ll be right down there .

But there was no one.

They camped near a green reflectorized sign that said LAS VEGAS 260. They had eaten comparatively well that day: taco chips, soda, and two Slim Jims that they shared out equally.

Tomorrow , Larry thought again, and slept. That night he dreamed that he and Barry Greig and the Tattered Remnants were playing at the Garden. It was their big chance—they were opening for some supergroup that was named after a city. Boston, or maybe Chicago. And all the microphone stands were at least nine feet tall again and he began to stumble from one to the other again as the audience began to clap rhythmically and call for “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” again.

He looked down in the first row and felt a slapping dash of cold icewater fear. Charles Manson was there, the x on his forehead healed to a white, twisted scar, clapping and chanting. And Richard Speck was there, looking up at Larry with cocky, impudent eyes, an unfiltered cigarette jittering between his lips. They were flanking the dark man. John Wayne Gacy was behind them. Flagg was leading the chant.

Tomorrow , Larry thought again, stumbling from one too-tall mike to the next under the hot dreamlights of Madison Square Garden. I’ll see you tomorrow .

But it was not the next day, or the day after that. On the evening of September 27 they camped in the town of Freemont Junction, and there was plenty to eat.

“I keep expecting it to be over,” Larry told Glen that evening. “And every day that it’s not, it gets worse.”

Glen nodded. “I feel the same way. It would be funny if he was just a mirage, wouldn’t it? Nothing but a bad dream in our collective consciousness.”

Larry looked at him with momentary surprised consideration. Then he shook his head slowly. “No. I don’t think it’s just a dream.”

Glen smiled. “Nor do I, young man. Nor do I.”

They made contact the following day.

At just past ten in the morning, they topped a rise and below them and to the west, five miles away, two cars were parked nose-to-nose, blocking the highway. It all looked exactly as Larry had thought it would.

“Accident?” Glen asked.

Ralph was shading his eyes. “I don’t think so. Not parked that way.”

“ His men,” Larry said.

“Yeah, I think so,” Ralph agreed. “What do we do now, Larry?”

Larry took his bandanna out of his back pocket and wiped his face with it. Today either summer had come back or they were starting to feel the southwestern desert. The temperature was in the low eighties.

But it’s a dry heat , he thought calmly. I’m only sweating a little. Just a little . He stuffed the bandanna back into his pocket. Now that it was actually on, he felt all right. Again there was that queer feeling that it was a performance, a show to be played.

“We go down and see if God really is with us. Right, Glen?”

“You’re the boss.”

They started to walk again. Half an hour brought them close enough to see that the nose-to-nose cars had once belonged to the Utah State Patrol. There were several armed men waiting for them.

“Are they going to shoot us?” Ralph asked conversationally.

“I don’t know,” Larry said.

“Because some of the rifles are wowsers. Scope-equipped. I can see the sun ticking off the lenses. If they want to knock us down, we’ll be in range anytime.”

They kept walking. The men at the roadblock split into two groups, about five men in front, guns aimed at the party of three walking toward them, and three more crouched behind the cars.

“Eight of them, Larry?” Glen asked.

“I make it eight, yeah. How are you doing, anyhow?”

“I’m okay,” Glen said.

“Ralph?”

“Just as long as we know what to do when the time comes,” Ralph said. “That’s all I want.”

Larry gripped his hand for a moment and squeezed it. Then he took Glen’s and did likewise.

They were less than a mile from the cruisers now. “They’re not going to shoot us outright,” Ralph said. “They would have done it already.”

Now they could discern faces, and Larry searched them curiously. One was heavily bearded. Another was young but mostly bald— must have been a bummer for him to start losing his hair while he was still in school , Larry thought. Another was wearing a bright yellow tank top with a picture of a grinning camel on it, and below the camel the word SUPERHUMP in scrolled, old-fashioned letters. Another of them had the look of an accountant. He was fiddling with a .357 Magnum, and he looked three times as nervous as Larry felt; he looked like a man who was going to blow off one of his own feet if he didn’t settle down.

“They don’t look no different from our guys,” Ralph said.

“Sure they do,” Glen answered. “They’re all packing iron.”