They went inside. Fran put the teapot on. They began to wait.
The four of them moved slowly southwest during the afternoon, not talking much. They were headed toward Golden, where they would camp this first night. They passed the burial sites, three of them now, and around four o'clock, when their shadows had begun to trail out long behind them and the heat had begun to sneak out of the day, they came to the township marker spotted beside the road at the southern edge of Boulder. For a moment Stu had a feeling that all of them were on the verge of turning together and going back. Ahead of them was darkness and death. Behind them was a little warmth, a little love.
Glen took a bandanna out of his back pocket, whipped it into a blue paisley rope, and tied it around his head. "Chapter Forty-Three, The Bald-Headed Sociologist Dons His Sweat-Band," he said hollowly. Kojak was up ahead, over the line into Golden, nosing his way happily through a splash of wildflowers.
"Ah, man," Larry said, and his voice was almost a sob. "I feel like this is the end of everything."
"Yeah," Ralph said. "It do feel like that."
"Anybody want to take five?" Glen asked without much hope.
"Come on," Stu said, smiling a little. "Do you dogfaces want to live forever?"
They went on, leaving Boulder behind them. By nine that night they were camped in Golden, half a mile from where Route 6 begins its twisting, turning course along Clear Creek and into the stone heart of the Rockies.
None of them slept well that first night. Already they felt far from home, and under the shadow of death.
BOOK III THE STAND Chapter 61
SEPTEMBER 7, 1990 - JANUARY 10, 1991
This land is your land
this land is my land,
from California
to the New York island,
from the redwood forests,
to the Gulf stream waters,
this land was made for you and me.
Woody Guthrie
" Hey Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check? "
Carley Yates
When the night has come
When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand by me.
Ben E. King
Chapter 61
The dark man had set his guardposts all along the eastern border of Oregon. The largest was at Ontario, where I-80 crosses over from Idaho; there were six men there, quartered in the trailer of a large Peterbilt truck. They had been there for more than a week, playing poker the whole time with twenties and fifties as useless as Monopoly money. One man was almost sixty thousand dollars ahead and another - a man whose working wage in the pre-plague world had been about ten thousand dollars a year - was over forty grand in the bucket.
It had rained almost the whole week, and tempers in the trailer were getting short. They had come out of Portland, and they wanted to get back there. There were women in Portland. Hung from a spike was a powerful two-way radio, broadcasting nothing but static. They were waiting for the radio to broadcast two simple words: Come home. That would mean that the man they were looking for had been captured somewhere else.
The man they were looking for was approximately seventy years old, heavyset, balding. He wore glasses and he was driving a white-over-blue four-wheel drive, either a jeep or an International-Harvester. He was to be killed when he was finally spotted.
They were edgy and bored - the novelty of high-stakes poker for real money had worn off two days ago, even for the dullest of them - but not bored enough to just take off for Portland on their own. They had received their orders from the Walkin Dude himself, and even after rain-induced cabin fever had set in, their terror of him remained. If they screwed the job up and he found out, God help them all.
So they sat and played cards and watched by turns at the sight-slit which had been carved through the side of the trailer's steel wall. I-80 was deserted in the dull, constant rain. But if the Scout happened along, it would be seen... and stopped.