BOOK III THE STAND Chapter 65
North of Las Vegas is Emigrant Valley, and that night a small spark of fire glowed in its tumbled wilderness. Randall Flagg sat beside it, moodily cooking the carcass of a small rabbit. He turned it steadily on the crude rotisserie he had made, watching it sizzle and spit grease into the fire. There was a light breeze, blowing the savory smell out into the desert, and the wolves had come. They sat two rises over from his fire, howling at the nearly full moon and at the smell of cooking meat. Every now and then he would glance at them and two or three would begin to fight, biting and snapping and kicking with their powerful back legs until the weakest was banished. Then the others would begin to howl again, their snouts pointed at the bloated, reddish moon.
But the wolves bored him now.
He wore his jeans and his tattered walking boots and his sheepskin jacket with its two buttons on the breast pockets: smiley-smile and HOW'S YOUR PORK? The night wind flapped fitfully at his collar.
He didn't like the way things were going.
There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn. The old woman had died and at first he had thought that was good. In spite of everything, he had been afraid of the old woman. She had died, and he had told Dayna Jurgens that she had died in a coma... but was it true? He was no longer quite so sure.
Had she talked, at the end? And if so, what had she said?
What were they planning?
He had developed a sort of third eye. It was like the levitating ability; something he had and accepted but which he didn't really understand. He was able to send it out, to see... almost always. But sometimes the eye fell mysteriously blind. He had been able to look into the old woman's death chamber, had seen them gathered around her, their tailfeathers still singed from Harold and Nadine's little surprise... but then the vision had faded away and he had been back in the desert, wrapped in his bedroll, looking up and seeing nothing but Cassiopeia in her starry rocking chair. And there had been a voice inside him that said: She's gone. They waited for her to talk but she never did.
But he no longer trusted the voice.
There was the troubling matter of the spies.
The Judge, with his head blown off.
The girl, who had eluded him at the last second. And she had known, Goddammit! She had known!
He threw a sudden furious stare at the wolves and nearly half a dozen fell to fighting, their guttural sounds like ripping cloth in the stillness.
He knew all their secrets except... the third. Who was the third? He had sent the Eye out over and over again, and it afforded him with nothing but the cryptic, idiotic face of the moon. M-O-O-N, that spells moon.
Who was the third?
How had the girl been able to escape him? He had been taken utterly by surprise, left with nothing but a handful of her blouse. He had known about her knife, that had been child's play, but not about that sudden leap at the window-wall. And the coldblooded way she had taken her own life, without a moment's hesitation. A mere space of seconds and she had been gone.
His thoughts chased each other like weasels in the dark.
Things were getting just a trifle flaky around the edges. He didn't like it.
Lauder, for instance. There was Lauder.
He had performed so excellently, like one of those little wind-up toys with a key sticking out of its back. Go here. Go there. Do this. Do that. But the dy***ite bomb had only gotten two of them - all that planning, all that effort spoiled by that dying old nigger woman's return. And then... after Harold had been disposed of... he had nearly killed Nadine! He still felt a burst of amazed anger when he thought about it. And the dumb cunt had stood there with her mouth hanging open, waiting for him to do it again, almost as if she wanted to be killed. And who was going to end up with all this, if Nadine died?
Who, if not his son?
The rabbit was done. He slipped it off the spit and onto his tin plate.
"All right, all you ass**le gyrenes, chow down!"
That made him grin right out loud. Had he been a Marine once? He thought so. Strictly the Parris Island variety, though. There had been a kid, a defective, name of Boo Dinkway. They had...
What?
Flagg frowned down at his messkit. Had they beaten ole Boo into the ground with those padded poles? Scragged him somehow? He seemed to remember something about gasoline. But what?
In a sudden rage, he almost slung the freshly cooked rabbit into the fire. He should be able to remember that, goddammit!