Stephen King - The Stand

“Not now,” Stu said. “I… I can’t talk now. Not about that. Just get the aspirin, okay? Then we’ll talk.”

“Okay…” But fear had settled onto Tom’s face like a gray cloud. “Kojak, want to come with Tom?”

Kojak did. They walked off together, heading east. Stu lay down and put an arm over his eyes.

When Stu slipped back into reality again, it was twilight. Tom was shaking him. “Stu! Wake up! Wake up, Stu!”

He was frightened by the way time seemed to be slipping by in sudden lurches—as if the teeth on the cog of his personal reality were wearing down. Tom had to help him sit up, and when he was sitting, he had to lean his head between his legs and cough. He coughed so long and hard that he almost passed out again. Tom watched him with alarm. Little by little, Stu got control of himself. He pulled the blankets closer around him. He was shivering again.

“What did you find, Tom?”

Tom held out a first-aid kit. Inside were Band-Aids, Mercurochrome, and a big bottle of Anacin. Stu was shocked to find he could not work the childproof cap. He had to give it to Tom, who finally worried it open. Stu washed down three Anacin with water from the plastic bottle.

“And I found this,” Tom said. “It was in a car full of camping stuff, but there was no tent.” It was a huge, puffy double sleeping bag, fluorescent orange on the outside, the lining done in a gaudy stars-and-bars pattern.

“Yeah, that’s great. Almost as good as a tent. You did fine, Tom.”

“And these. They were in the same car.” Tom reached into his jacket and produced half a dozen foil packages. Stu could hardly believe his eyes. Freeze-dried concentrates. Eggs. Peas. Squash. Dried beef. “Food, isn’t it, Stu? It’s got pictures of food on it, laws, yes.”

“It’s food,” Stu agreed gratefully. “Just about the only kind I can eat, I think.” His head was buzzing, and far away, at the center of his brain, a sweetly sickening high C hummed on and on. “Can we heat some water? We don’t have a pot or a kettle.”

“I’ll find something.”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Stu—”

Stu looked into that troubled, miserable face, still a boy’s face in spite of the beard, and slowly shook his head.

“Dead, Tom,” he said gently. “Nick’s dead. Almost a month ago. It was a… a political thing. Assassination, I s’pose you’d say. I’m sorry.”

Tom lowered his head, and in the freshly built-up fire, Stu saw his tears fall into his lap. They fell in a gentle silver rain. But he was silent. At last he looked up, his blue eyes brighter than ever. He wiped at them with the heel of his hand.

“I knew he was,” he said huskily. “I didn’t want to think I knew, but I did. Laws, yes. He kept turning his back and going away. He was my main man, Stu—did you know that?”

Stu reached out and took Tom’s big hand. “I knew, Tom.”

“Yes he was, M-O-O-N, that spells my main man. I miss him awful. But I’m going to see him in heaven. Tom Cullen will see him there. And he’ll be able to talk and I’ll be able to think. Isn’t that right?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all, Tom.”

“It was the bad man killed Nick. Tom knows. But God fixed that bad man. I saw it. The hand of God came down out of the sky.” There was a cold wind whistling over the floor of the Utah badlands, and Stu shivered violently in its clasp. “Fixed him for what he did to Nick and to the poor Judge. Laws, yes.”

“What do you know about the Judge, Tom?”

“Dead! Up in Oregon! Shot him!”

Stu nodded wearily. “And Dayna? Do you know anything about her?”

“Tom saw her, but he doesn’t know. They gave me a job cleaning up. And when I came back one day I saw her doing her job. She was up in the air changing a streetlight bulb. She looked at me and…” He fell silent for a moment, and when he spoke again it was more to himself than to Stu. “Did she see Tom? Did she know Tom? Tom doesn’t know. Tom… thinks … she did. But Tom never saw her again.”

Tom left to go foraging shortly after, taking Kojak with him, and Stu dozed. He returned not with a big tin can, which was the best Stu had hoped for, but with a broiling pan big enough to hold a Christmas turkey. There were treasures in the desert, apparently. Stu grinned in spite of the painful fever blisters that had begun to form on his lips. Tom told him he had gotten the pan from an orange truck with a big U on it—someone who had been fleeing the superflu with all their worldly possessions, Stu guessed. Much good it had done them.

Half an hour later there was food. Stu ate carefully, sticking to the vegetables, watering the concentrates enough to make a thin gruel. He held everything down and felt a little better, at least for the time being. Not long after supper, he and Tom went to sleep with Kojak between them.

“Tom, listen to me.”

Tom hunkered down by Stu’s big, fluffy sleeping bag. It was the next morning. Stu had been able to eat only a little breakfast; his throat was sore and badly swollen, all his joints painful. The cough was worse, and the Anacin wasn’t doing much of a job of knocking back the fever.

“I got to get inside and get some medicine into me or I’m gonna die. And it has to be today. Now, the closest town is Green River, and that’s sixty miles east of here. We’ll have to drive.”

“Tom Cullen can’t drive a car, Stu. Laws, no!”

“Yeah, I know. It’s gonna be a chore for me, because as well as being sick as a dog, I broke the wrong friggin leg.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well… never mind right now. It’s too hard to explain. We won’t even worry about it, because that ain’t the first problem. The first problem is getting a car to start. Most of them have been sitting out here three months or more. The batteries will be as flat as pancakes. So we’ll need a little luck. We got to find a stalled car with a standard shift at the top of one of these hills. We might do it. It’s pretty hilly country.” He didn’t add that the car would have to have been kept reasonably tuned, would have to have some gas in it… and an ignition key. All those guys on TV might know how to hotwire a car, but Stu didn’t have a clue.

He looked up at the sky, which was scumming over with clouds. “Most of it’s on you, Tom. You got to be my legs.”

“All right, Stu. When we get the car, are we going back to Boulder? Tom wants to go to Boulder, don’t you?”

“More than anything, Tom.” He looked toward the Rockies, which were a dim shadow on the horizon. Had the snow started falling up in the high passes yet? Almost certainly. And if not yet, then soon. Winter came early in this high and forsaken part of the world. “It may take a while,” he said.

“How do we start?”

“By making a travois.”

“Trav—?”

Stu gave Tom his pocket knife. “You’ve got to make holes in the bottom of this sleeping bag. One on each side.”

It took them an hour to make the travois. Tom found a couple of fairly straight sticks to ram down into the sleeping bag and out the holes at the bottom. Tom got some rope from the U-Haul where he had gotten the broiling pan, and Stu used it to secure the sleeping bag to the poles. When it was done, it reminded Stu more of a crazy rickshaw than a travois like the ones the Plains Indians had used.

Tom picked up the poles and looked doubtfully over his shoulder. “Are you in, Stu?”

“Yeah.” He wondered how long the seams would hold before unraveling straight up the sides of the bag. “How heavy am I, Tommy?”

“Not bad. I can haul you a long way. Giddup!”

They started moving. The gully where Stu had broken his leg—where he had been sure he was going to die—fell slowly behind them. Weak though he was, Stu felt a mad sort of exultation. Not there, anyway. He was going to die somewhere, and probably soon, but it wasn’t going to be alone in that muddy ditch. The sleeping bag swayed back and forth, lulling him. He dozed. Tom pulled him along under a thickening scud of clouds. Kojak padded along beside them.