Stephen King - The Stand

“And that almost killed you?”

Nick pulled up his jeans and belted them. “It wasn’t deep, but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection’s the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the superflu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind.”

“Infection,” Tom whispered, fascinated. They were walking again, almost floating along the sidewalk.

“Tom, Stu’s got an infection now.”

“No… no, don’t say that, Nick… you’re scaring Tom Cullen, laws, yes, you are!”

“I know I am, Tom, and I’m sorry. But you have to know. He has pneumonia in both lungs. He’s been sleeping outside for nearly two weeks. There are things you have to do for him. And still, he’ll almost certainly die. You have to be prepared for that.”

“No, don’t—”

“Tom.” Nick put his hand on Tom’s shoulder, but Tom felt nothing… it was as if Nick’s hand was nothing but smoke. “If he dies, you and Kojak have to go on. You have to get back to Boulder and tell them that you saw the hand of God in the desert. If it’s God’s will, Stu will go with you… in time. If it’s God’s will that Stu should die, then he will. Like me.”

“Nick,” Tom begged. “Please—”

“I showed you my leg for a reason. There are pills for infections. In places like this.”

Tom looked around and was surprised to see that they were no longer on the street. They were in a dark store. A drugstore. A wheelchair was suspended on piano wire from the ceiling like a ghostly mechanical corpse. A sign on Tom’s right advertised: CONTINENCE SUPPLIES.

“Yes, sir? May I help you?”

Tom whirled around. Nick was behind the counter, in a white coat.

“Nick?”

“Yes, sir.” Nick began to put small bottles of pills in front of Tom. “This is penicillin. Very good for pneumonia. This is ampicillin, and this one’s amoxicillin. Also good stuff. And this is V-cillin, most commonly given to children, and it may work if the others don’t. He’s to drink lots of water, and he should have juices, but that may not be possible. So give him these. They’re vitamin C tablets. Also, he must be walked—”

“ I can’t remember all of that! ” Tom wailed.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to. Because there is no one else. You’re on your own.”

Tom began to cry.

Nick leaned forward. His arm swung. There was no slap—again there was only that feeling that Nick was smoke which had passed around him and possibly through him—but Tom felt his head rock back all the same. Something in his head seemed to snap.

“Stop that! You can’t be a baby now, Tom! Be a man! For God’s sake, be a man!”

Tom stared at Nick, his hand on his cheek, his eyes wide.

“Walk him,” Nick said. “Get him on his good leg. Drag him, if you have to. But get him off his back or he’ll drown.”

“He isn’t himself,” Tom said. “He shouts… he shouts to people who aren’t there.”

“He’s delirious. Walk him anyway. All you can. Make him take the penicillin, one pill at a time. Give him aspirin. Keep him warm. Pray. Those are all the things you can do.”

“All right, Nick. All right, I’ll try to be a man. I’ll try to remember. But I wish you was here, laws, yes, I do!”

“You do your best, Tom. That’s all.”

Nick was gone. Tom woke up and found himself standing in the deserted drugstore by the prescription counter. Standing on the glass were four bottles of pills. Tom stared at them for a long time and then gathered them up.

Tom came back at four in the morning, his shoulders frosted with sleet. Outside, it was letting up, and there was a thin clean line of dawn in the east. Kojak barked an ecstatic welcome, and Stu moaned and woke up. Tom knelt beside him. “Stu?”

“Tom? Hard to breathe.”

“I’ve got medicine, Stu. Nick showed me. You take it and get rid of that infection. You have to take one right now.” From the bag he had brought in, Tom produced the four bottles of pills and a tall bottle of Gatorade. Nick had been wrong about the juice. There was plenty of bottled juice in the Green River Superette.

Stu looked at the pills, holding them closely to his eyes. “Tom, where did you get these?”

“In the drugstore. Nick gave them to me.”

“No, really.”

“Really! Really! You have to take the penicillin first to see if that works. Which one says penicillin?”

“This one does… but Tom…”

“No. You have to. Nick said so. And you have to walk.”

“I can’t walk. I got a bust leg. And I’m sick.” Stu’s voice became sulky, petulant. It was a sickroom voice.

“You have to. Or I’ll drag you,” Tom said.

Stu lost his tenuous grip on reality. Tom put one of the penicillin capsules in his mouth, and Stu reflex-swallowed it with Gatorade to keep from choking. He began to cough wretchedly anyway, and Tom pounded him on the back as if he were burping a baby. Then he hauled Stu to his good foot by main force and began to drag him around the lobby, Kojak following them anxiously.

“Please God,” Tom said. “Please God, please God.”

Stu cried out: “I know where I can get her a washboard, Glen! That music store has em! I seen one in the window!”

“Please God,” Tom panted. Stu’s head lolled on his shoulder. It felt as hot as a furnace. His splinted leg dragged uselessly.

Boulder had never seemed so far away as it did on that dismal morning.

Stu’s struggle with pneumonia lasted two weeks. He drank quarts of Gatorade, V-8, Welch’s grape juice, and various brands of orange drink. He rarely knew what he was drinking. His urine was strong and acidic. He messed himself like a baby, and like a baby’s his stools were yellow and loose and totally blameless. Tom kept him clean. Tom dragged him around the lobby of the Utah Hotel. And Tom waited for the night when he would wake, not because Stu was raving in his sleep, but because his labored breathing had finally ceased.

The penicillin produced an ugly red rash after two days, and Tom switched to the ampicillin. That was better. On October 7 Tom awoke in the morning to find Stu sleeping more deeply than he had in days. His entire body was soaked with sweat, but his forehead was cool. The fever had snapped in the night. For the next two days, Stu did little but sleep. Tom had to struggle to wake him up enough to take his pills and sugar cubes from the restaurant attached to the Utah Hotel.

He relapsed on October 11, and Tom was terribly afraid it was the end. But the fever did not go as high, and his respiration never got as thick and labored as it had been on those terrifying early mornings of the fifth and the sixth.

On October 13 Tom awoke from a dazed nap in one of the lobby chairs to find Stu sitting up and looking around. “Tom,” he whispered. “I’m alive.”

“Yes,” Tom said joyfully. “Laws, yes!”

“I’m hungry. Could you rustle up some soup, Tom? With noodles in it, maybe?”

By the eighteenth his strength had begun to come back a little. He was able to get around the lobby for five minutes at a time on the crutches Tom brought him from the drugstore. There was a steady, maddening itch from his broken leg as the bones began to knit themselves together. On October 20 he went outside for the first time, bundled up in thermal underwear and a huge sheepskin coat.

The day was warm and sunny, but with an undertone of coolness. In Boulder it might still be mid-fall, the aspens turning gold, but here winter was almost close enough to touch. He could see small patches of frozen, granulated snow in shadowed areas the sun never touched.