Stephen King - The Stand

“I don’t know, Tom,” he said. “I think we can get over to Grand Junction, but after that I just don’t know. There’s going to be a lot of snow in the mountains. And I don’t dare move for a while, anyway. I’ve got to get my go back.”

“How long before your go comes back, Stu?”

“I don’t know, Tom. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Stu was determined not to move too quickly, not to push it—he had been close enough to death to relish his recovery. He wanted it to be as complete as it could be. They moved out of the hotel lobby into a pair of connecting rooms down the first-floor hall. The room across the way became Kojak’s temporary doghouse. Stu’s leg was indeed knitting, but because of the improper set, it was never going to be the same straight limb again, unless he got George Richardson to rebreak it and set it properly. When he got off the crutches, he was going to have a limp.

Nonetheless, he set to work exercising it, trying to tone it up. Bringing the leg back to even 75 percent efficiency was going to be a long process, but so far as he could tell, he had a whole winter to do it in.

On October 28 Green River was dusted with nearly five inches of snow.

“If we don’t make our move soon,” Stu told Tom as they looked out at the snow, “we’ll be spending the whole damn winter in the Utah Hotel.”

The next day they drove the Plymouth down to the gas station on the outskirts of town. Pausing often to rest and using Tom for the heavy work, they changed the balding back tires for a pair of studded snows. Stu considered taking a four-wheel drive, and had finally decided, quite irrationally, that they should stick with their luck. Tom finished the operation by loading four fifty-pound bags of sand into the Plymouth’s trunk. They left Green River on Halloween and headed east.

They reached Grand Junction at noon on November 2, with not much more than three hours to spare, as it turned out. The skies had been lead-gray all the forenoon, and as they turned down the main street, the first spits of snow began to skate across the Plymouth’s hood. They had seen brief flurries half a dozen times en route, but this was not going to be a flurry. The sky promised serious snow.

“Pick your spot,” Stu said. “We may be here for a while.”

Tom pointed. “There! The motel with the star on it!”

The motel with the star on it was the Grand Junction Holiday Inn. Below the sign and the beckoning star was a marquee, and written on it in large red letters was: ELCOME TO GR ND JUNC ON’S SUMMERF ST ‘90! JUNE 12 – JU Y 4TH!

“Okay,” Stu said. “Holiday Inn it is.”

He pulled in and killed the Plymouth’s engine, and so far as either of them knew, it never ran again. By two that afternoon, the spits and spats of snow had developed into a thick white curtain that fell soundlessly and seemingly endlessly. By four o’clock the light wind had turned into a gale, driving the snow before it and piling up drifts that grew with a speed which was almost hallucinatory. It snowed all night. When Stu and Tom got up the next morning, they found Kojak sitting in front of the big double doors in the lobby, looking out at a nearly moveless world of white. Nothing moved but a single bluejay that was strutting around on the crushed remnants of a summer awning across the street.

“Jeezly crow,” Tom whispered. “We’re snowed in, ain’t we, Stu?”

Stu nodded.

“How can we get back to Boulder in this?”

“We wait for spring,” Stu said.

“That long?” Tom looked distressed, and Stu put an arm around the big man-boy’s shoulders.

“The time will pass,” he said, but even then he was not sure either of them would be able to wait that long.

Stu had been moaning and gasping in the darkness for some time. At last he gave a cry loud enough to wake himself up and came out of the dream to his Holiday Inn motel room up on his elbows, staring wide-eyed at nothing. He let out a long, shivery sigh and fumbled for the lamp by the bed table. He had clicked it twice before everything came back. It was funny, how hard that belief in electricity died. He found the Coleman lamp on the floor and lit that instead. When he had it going, he used the chamberpot. Then he sat down in the chair by the desk. He looked at his watch and saw it was quarter past three in the morning.

The dream again. The Frannie dream. The nightmare.

It was always the same. Frannie in pain, her face bathed in sweat. Richardson was between her legs, and Laurie Constable was standing nearby to assist him. Fran’s feet were up in stainless-steel stirrups…

Push, Frannie. Bear down. You’re doing fine .

But looking at George’s somber eyes over the top of his mask, Stu knew that Frannie wasn’t doing fine at all. Something was wrong. Laurie sponged off her sweaty face and pushed back her hair from her forehead.

Breech birth .

Who had said that? It was a sinister, bodiless voice, low and draggy, like a voice on a 45 rpm record played at 33 1/3.

Breech birth .

George’s voice: You’d better call Dick. Tell him we may have to…

Laurie’s voice: Doctor, she’s losing a lot of blood now…

Stu lit a cigarette. It was terribly stale, but after that particular dream, anything was a comfort. It’s an anxiety dream, that’s all. You got this typical macho idea that things won’t come right if you’re not there. Well, bag it up, Stuart; she’s fine. Not all dreams come true .

But too many of them had come true during the last half-year. The feeling that he was being shown the future in this recurring dream of Fran’s delivery would not leave him.

He stubbed the cigarette out half-smoked and looked blankly into the gaslamp’s steady glow. It was November 29; they had been quartered in the Grand Junction Holiday Inn for nearly four weeks. The time had passed slowly, but they had managed to keep amused with a whole town to plunder for diverting odds and ends.

Stu had found a medium-sized Honda electrical generator in a supply house on Grand Avenue, and he and Tom had hauled it back to the Convention Hall across from the Holiday Inn by putting it onto a sledge with a chainfall and then hooking up two Sno Cats to the sledge—moving it, in other words, in much the same way the Trashcan Man had moved his final gift for Randall Flagg.

“What are we gonna do with it?” Tom asked. “Get the electricity going at the motel?”

“This is too small for that,” Stu said.

“What, then? What’s it for ?” Tom was fairly dancing with impatience.

“You’ll see,” Stu said.

They put the generator in the Convention Hall’s electrical closet, and Tom promptly forgot about it—which was just what Stu had hoped for. The next day he went to the Grand Junction Sixplex by snowmobile, and using the sledge and the chainfall himself this time, he had lowered an old thirty-five-millimeter motion picture projector from the second-story window of the storage area where he had found it on one of his exploring trips. It had been wrapped in plastic… and then simply forgotten, judging by the dust which had gathered on the protective covering.

His leg was coming around nicely, but it had still taken him almost three hours to muscle the projector from the doorway of the Convention Hall into the center of the floor. He used three dollies and kept expecting Tom to happen by at any moment, looking for him. With Tom to pitch in, the work would have gone faster, but it also would have spoiled the surprise. But Tom was apparently off on business of his own, and Stu didn’t see him all day. When he came into the Holiday Inn around five, apple-cheeked and wrapped in a scarf, the surprise was all ready.