Stephen King - The Stand

“I’m okay,” Stu said, and managed to gain his feet.

It was twenty minutes later when a young, nervous voice quavered out of the dark, freezing them to the spot:

“W-Who g-goes there?”

Kojak began to growl, his fur bushing up into hackles. Tom gasped. And just audible below the steady shriek of the wind, Stu heard a sound that caused terror to race through him: the snick of a rifle bolt being levered back.

Sentries. They’ve posted sentries. Be funny to come all this way and get shot by a sentry outside the Table Mesa Shopping Center. Real funny. That’s one even Randall Flagg could appreciate .

“Stu Redman!” he yelled into the dark. “It’s Stu Redman here!” He swallowed and heard an audible click in his throat. “Who’s that over there?”

Stupid. Won’t be anyone that you know —

But the voice that drifted out of the snow did sound familiar. “Stu? Stu Redman ?”

“Tom Cullen’s with me… for Christ’s sake, don’t shoot us!”

“Is it a trick?” The voice seemed to be deliberating with itself.

“No trick! Tom, say something.”

“Hi there,” Tom said obediently.

There was a pause. The snow blew and shrieked around them. Then the sentry (yes, that voice was familiar) called: “Stu had a picture on the wall in the old apartment. What was it?”

Stu racked his brain frantically. The sound of the drawn rifle bolt kept recurring, getting in the way. He thought, My God, I’m standing here in a blizzard trying to think what picture was on the wall in the apartment—the old apartment, he said. Fran must have moved in with Lucy. Lucy used to make fun of that picture, used to say that John Wayne was waiting for those Indians just where you couldn’t see him —

“Frederic Remington!” He bellowed at the top of his lungs. “It’s called The Warpath! ”

“Stu!” the sentry yelled back. A black shape materialized out of the snow, slipping and sliding as it ran toward them. “I just can’t believe it—”

Then he was in front of them, and Stu saw it was Billy Gehringer, who had caused them so much trouble with his hot-rodding last summer.

“Stu! Tom! And Kojak, by Christ! Where’s Glen Bateman and Larry? Where’s Ralph?”

Stu shook his head slowly. “Don’t know. We got to get out of the cold, Billy. We’re freezing.”

“Sure, the supermarket’s right up the road. I’ll call Norm Kellogg… Harry Dunbarton… Dick Ellis… shit, I’ll wake the town! This is great! I don’t believe it!”

“Billy—”

Billy turned back to them, and Stu limped over to where he stood.

“Billy, Fran was going to have a baby—”

Billy grew very still. And then he whispered, “Oh shit, I forgot about that.”

“She’s had it?”

“George. George Richardson can tell you, Stu. Or Dan Lathrop. He’s our new doc, we got him about four weeks after you guys left, used to be a nose, throat, and ears man, but he’s pretty g—”

Stu gave Billy a brisk shake, cutting off his almost frantic babble.

“What’s wrong?” Tom asked. “Is something wrong with Frannie?”

“Talk to me, Billy,” Stu said. “Please.”

“Fran’s okay,” Billy said. “She’s going to be fine.”

“That what you heard?”

“No, I saw her. Me and Tony Donahue, we went up together with some flowers from the greenhouse. The greenhouse is Tony’s project, he’s got all kinds of stuff growing there, not just flowers. The only reason she’s still in is because she had to have a what-do-you-call-it, a Roman birth—”

“A cesarean section?”

“Yeah, right, because the baby came the wrong way. But no sweat. We went to see her three days after she had the baby, it was January seventh we went up, two days ago. We brought her some roses. We figured she could use some cheering up because…”

“The baby died?” Stu asked dully.

“It’s not dead,” Billy said, and then he added with great reluctance: “Not yet.”

Stu suddenly felt far away, rushing through the void. He heard laughter… and the howling of wolves…

Billy said in a miserable rush: “It’s got the flu. It’s got Captain Trips. It’s the end for all of us, that’s what people are saying. Frannie had him on the fourth, a boy, six pounds nine ounces, and at first he was okay and I guess everybody in the Zone got drunk, Dick Ellis said it was like V-E Day and V-J Day all rolled into one, and then on the sixth, he… he just got it. Yeah, man,” Billy said, and his voice began to hitch and thicken. “He got it, oh shit, ain’t that some welcome home, I’m so fuckin sorry, Stu…”

Stu reached out, found Billy’s shoulder, and pulled him closer.

“At first everybody was sayin he might get better, maybe it’s just the ordinary flu… or bronchitis… maybe the croup… but the docs, they said newborn babies almost never get those things. It’s like a natural immunity, because they’re so little. And both George and Dan… they saw so much of the superflu last year…”

“That it would be hard for them to make a mistake,” Stu finished for him.

“Yeah,” Billy whispered. “You got it.”

“What a bitch,” Stu muttered. He turned away from Billy and began to limp down the road again.

“Stu, where are you going?”

“To the hospital,” Stu said. “To see my woman.”

Fran lay awake with the reading lamp on. It cast a pool of bright light on the left side of the clean white sheet that covered her. In the center of the light, face-down, was an Agatha Christie. She was awake but slowly drifting off, in that state where memories clarify magically as they begin to transmute themselves into dreams. She was going to bury her father. What happened after that didn’t matter, but she was going to drag herself out of the shockwave enough to get that done. The act of love. When that was done, she could cut herself a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie. It would be large, it would be juicy, and it would be very, very bitter.

Marcy had been in half an hour ago to check on her, and Fran had asked, “Is Peter dead yet?” And even as she spoke, time seemed to double so that she wasn’t sure if she meant Peter the baby or Peter the baby’s grandfather, now deceased.

“Shhh, he’s fine,” Marcy had said, but Frannie had seen a more truthful answer in Marcy’s eyes. The baby she had made with Jess Rider was engaged in dying somewhere behind four glass walls. Perhaps Lucy’s baby would have better luck; both of its parents had been immune to Captain Trips. The Zone had written off her Peter now and had pinned its collective hopes on those women who had conceived after July 1 of last year. It was brutal but completely understandable.

Her mind drifted, cruising at some low level along the border of sleep, conning the terrain of her past and the landscape of her heart. She thought about her mother’s parlor where seasons passed in a dry age. She thought about Stu’s eyes, about the first sight of her baby, Peter Goldsmith-Redman. She dreamed that Stu was with her, in her room.

“Fran?”

Nothing had worked out the way it should have. All of the hopes had turned out to be phony, as false as those Audioanimatronic animals at Disney World, just a bunch of clockwork, a cheat, a false dawn, a false pregnancy, a—

“Hey, Frannie.”

In her dream she saw that Stu had come back. He was standing in the doorway of her room, wearing a gigantic fur parka. Another cheat. But she saw that the dream-Stu had a beard. Wasn’t that funny?

She began to wonder if it was a dream when she saw Tom Cullen standing behind him. And… was that Kojak sitting at Stu’s heel?