The Stand

Larry himself had been totally unhurt.

Same old Larry - keeps his head while others all around him are losing theirs. The blast had thrown him across the driveway and into a flower bed, but he had not sustained a single scratch. Jagged shrapnel had rained down all around him, but nothing had touched him. Nick had died, Susan had died, and he had been unhurt. Yeah; same old Larry Underwood.

Deathwatch in here, deathwatch out there. All the way up the block. Six hundred of them, easy. Harold, you ought to come on back with a dozen hand grenades and finish the job. Harold. He had followed Harold all the way across the country, had followed a trail of Payday candy wrappers and clever improvisations. Larry had almost lost his fingers getting gas back in Wells. Harold had simply found the plug vent and used a siphon. Harold was the one who had suggested the memberships in the various committees slide upward with population. Harold, who had suggested that the ad hoc committee be accepted in toto. Clever Harold. Harold and his ledger. Harold and his grin.

It was all well and good for Stu to say no one could have figured out what Harold and Nadine were up to from a few scraps of wire on an air-hockey table. With Larry that line of reasoning just didn't hold up. He had seen Harold's brilliant improvisations before. One of them had been written on the roof of a barn in letters almost twenty feet high, for Christ's sweet sake. He should have guessed. Inspector Underwood was great at ferreting out candy wrappers, but not so great when it came to dy***ite. In point of fact, Inspector Underwood was a bloody ass**le.

Larry, if you knew  -

Nadine's voice.

If you want, I'll get down on my knees and beg.

That had been another chance to avert the murder and destruction... one he could never bring himself to tell anybody about. Had it really been in the works even then? Probably. If not the specifics of the dy***ite bomb wired to the walkie-talkie, then at least some general plan.

Flagg's plan.

Yes - in the background there was always Flagg, the dark puppet master, pulling the strings on Harold, Nadine, on Charlie Impening, God knew how many others. The people in the Zone would happily lynch Harold on sight, but it was Flagg's doing... and Nadine's. And who had sent her to Harold, if not Flagg? But before she had gone to Harold she had come to Larry. And he had sent her away.

How could he have said yes? There was his responsibility to Lucy. That had been all-important, not just because of her but because of himself - he sensed it would take only one or two more fades to destroy him as a man for good. So he had sent her away, and he supposed Flagg was well pleased with the previous night's work... if Flagg was really his name. Oh, Stu was still alive, and he spoke for the committee - he was the mouth that Nick could never use. Glen was alive, and Larry supposed he was the point-man of the committee's mind, but Nick had been the heart of the committee, and Sue, along with Frannie, had served as its moral conscience. Yes, he thought bitterly, all in all, a good evening's work for that bastard. He ought to reward Harold and Nadine well when they got over there.

He turned from the window, feeling a dull throb behind his forehead. Richardson was taking Mother Abagail's pulse. Laurie was fiddling with the IV bottles hung on their T-shaped rack. Dick Ellis was standing by. Lucy sat by the door, looking at Larry.

"How is she?" Larry asked George.

"The same," Richardson said.

"Will she live through the night?"

"I can't say, Larry."

The woman on the bed was a skeleton covered with thinly stretched, ash-gray skin. She seemed without sex. Most of her hair was gone; her br**sts were gone; her mouth hung unhinged and her breath rasped through it harshly. To Larry, she looked like pictures he had seen of the Yucatán mummies - not decayed but shriveled; cured; dry; ageless.

Yes, that's what she was now, not a mother but a mummy. There was only that harsh sigh of her respiration, like a light breeze through hay-stubble. How could she still be alive? Larry wondered... and what God would put her through it? To what purpose? It had to be a joke, a big cosmic horselaugh. George said he had heard of similar cases, but never of one so extreme, and he himself had never expected to see one. She was somehow... eating herself. Her body had kept running long after it should have succumbed to malnutrition. She was breaking down parts of herself for nourishment that had never been meant to be broken down. Lucy, who had lifted her onto the bed, had told him in a low, marveling voice that she seemed to weigh no more than a child's box kite, a thing only waiting for a puff of wind to blow it away forever.

And now Lucy spoke from her corner by the door, startling all of them: "She's got something to say."

Laurie said uncertainly, "She's in deep coma, Lucy... the chances that she can ever regain consciousness..."

"She came back to tell us something. And God won't let her go until she does."