Stephen King - The Stand

Her hand flew suddenly up to her cheek and pinched viciously, making her left eye water. Nothing changed.

“Stu?” she whispered. “Oh my God, is it Stu?”

His face was deeply tanned except for the skin around his eyes, which might have been covered by sunglasses. That was not a detail you would expect to notice in a dream—

She pinched herself again:

“It’s me,” Stu said, coming into the room. “Stop workin yourself over, honey.” His limp was so severe he was nearly stumbling. “Frannie, I’m home.”

“Stu!” she cried. “ Are you real? If you’re real, come here!”

He went to her then, and held her.

Stu was sitting in a chair drawn up to Fran’s bed when George Richardson and Dan Lathrop came in. Fran immediately seized Stu’s hand and squeezed it tightly, almost painfully. Her face was set in rigid lines, and for a moment Stu saw what she would look like when she was old; for a moment she looked like Mother Abagail.

“Stu,” George said. “I heard about your return. Miraculous. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you. We all are.”

George shook his hand and then introduced Dan Lathrop.

Dan said, “We’ve heard there was an explosion in Las Vegas. You actually saw it?”

“Yes.”

“People around here seem to think it was a nuclear blast. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

George nodded at this, then seemed to dismiss it and turned to Fran.

“How are you feeling?”

“All right. Glad to have my man back. What about the baby?”

“Actually,” Lathrop said, “that’s what we’re here about.”

Fran nodded. “Dead?”

George and Dan exchanged a glance. “Frannie, I want you to listen carefully and try not to misunderstand anything I say—”

Lightly, with suppressed hysteria, Fran said: “If he’s dead, just tell me!”

“Fran,” Stu said.

“Peter seems to be recovering,” Dan Lathrop said mildly.

There was a moment of utter shocked silence in the room. Fran, her face pale and oval below the dark chestnut mass of her hair on the pillow, looked up at Dan as if he had suddenly begun to spout some sort of lunatic doggerel. Someone—either Laurie Constable or Marcy Spruce—looked into the room and then passed on. It was a moment that Stu never forgot.

“What?” Fran whispered at last.

George said, “You mustn’t get your hopes up.”

“You said… recovering,” Fran said. Her face was flatly stunned. Until this moment she hadn’t realized how much she had resigned herself to the baby’s death.

George said, “Both Dan and I saw thousands of cases during the epidemic, Fran… you notice I don’t say ‘treated’ because I don’t think either of us ever changed the course of the disease by a jot or a tittle in any patient. Fair statement, Dan?”

“Yes.”

The I-want line that Stu had first noticed in New Hampshire hours after meeting her now appeared on Fran’s forehead. “Will you get to the point, for heaven’s sake?”

“I’m trying, but I have to be careful and I’m going to be careful,” George said. “This is your son’s life we’re discussing, and I’m not going to let you press me. I want you to understand the drift of our thinking. Captain Trips was a shifting-antigen flu, we think now. Now, every kind of flu—the old flu—had a different antigen; that’s why it kept coming back every two or three years or so in spite of flu vaccinations. There would be an outbreak of A-type flu, Hong Kong flu that was, and you’d get a vaccination for it, and then two years later a B-type strain would come along and you’d get sick unless you got a different vaccination.”

“But you’d get well again,” Dan broke in, “because eventually your body would produce its own antibodies. Your body changed to cope with the flu. With Captain Trips, the flu itself changed every time your body came to a defense posture. In that way it was more similar to the AIDS virus than to the common sorts of flu our bodies have become used to. And as with AIDS, it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death.”

“Then why didn’t we get it?” Stu asked.

George said: “We don’t know. I don’t think we’re ever going to know. The only thing we can be sure about is that the immunes didn’t get sick and then throw the sickness off; they never got sick at all. Which brings us to Peter again. Dan?”

“Yes. The key to Captain Trips is that people seemed to get almost better, but never completely better. Now this baby, Peter, got sick forty-eight hours after he was born. There was no doubt at all that it was Captain Trips—the symptoms were classic. But those discolorations under the line of the jaw, which both George and I had come to associate with the fourth and terminal stage of superflu— they never came . On the other hand, his periods of remission have been getting longer and longer.”

“I don’t understand,” Fran said, bewildered. “What—”

“Every time the flu shifts, Peter is shifting right back at it,” George said. “There’s still the technical possibility that he might relapse, but he has never entered the final, critical phase. He seems to be wearing it out.”

There was a moment of total silence.

Dan said, “You’ve passed on half an immunity to your child, Fran. He got it, but we think now he’s got the ability to lick it. We theorize that Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had the same chance, but with the odds stacked much more radically against them—and I still think that they may not have died of the superflu, but of complications arising from the superflu. That’s a very small distinction, I know, but it may be crucial.”

“And the other women who got pregnant by men who weren’t immune?” Stu asked.

“We think they’ll have to watch their babies go through the same painful struggle,” George said, “and some of the children may die—it was touch and go with Peter for a while, and may be again from all we know now. But very shortly we’re going to reach the point where all the fetuses, in the Free Zone—in the world —are the product of two immune parents. And while it wouldn’t be fair to pre-guess, I’d be willing to lay money that when that happens, it’s going to be our ballgame. In the meantime, we’re going to be watching Peter very closely.”

“And we won’t be watching him alone, if that’s any added consolation,” Dan added. “In a very real sense, Peter belongs to the entire Free Zone right now.”

Fran whispered, “I only want him to live because he’s mine and I love him.” She, looked at Stu. “And he’s my link with the old world. He looks more like Jess than me, and I’m glad. That seems right. Do you understand, love?”

Stu nodded, and a strange thought occurred to him—how much he would like to sit down with Hap and Norm Bruett and Vic Palfrey and have a beer with them and watch Vic make one of his shitty-smelling home-rolled cigarettes, and tell them how all of this had come out. They had always called him Silent Stu; ole Stu, they said, wouldn’t say “shit” if he had a mouthful. But he would talk their ears off their heads. He would talk all night and all day. He grasped Fran’s hand blindly, feeling the sting of tears.

“We’ve got rounds to make,” George said, getting up, “but we’ll be monitoring Peter closely, Fran. You’ll know for sure when we know for sure.”

“When could I nurse him? If… If he doesn’t… ?”

“A week,” Dan said.

“But that’s so long!”

“It’s going to be long for all of us. We’ve got sixty-one pregnant women in the Zone, and nine of them conceived before the superflu. It’s going to be especially long for them. Stu? It was good meeting you.” Dan held out his hand and Stu shook it. He left quickly, a man with a necessary job to do and anxious to do it.