He flew high, wide, and silent over a graveyard world. Below him the desert lay like a whited sepulcher cut by the dark ribbon of the interstate highway. He flew east, over the state line now, his body far behind, glittering eyes rolled up to blind whites.
Now the land began to change. Buttes and strange, wind-carved pillars and tabletop mesas. The highway ran straight through. The Bonneville Salt Flats lay to the far north. Skull Valley somewhere west. Flying. The sound of the wind, dead and distant...
An eagle poised in the highest crotch of an ancient lightning-blasted pine somewhere south of Richfield felt something pass close by, some deadly sighted thing whizzing through the night, and the eagle took wing against it, fearless, and was buffeted away by a grinning sensation of deadly cold. The eagle fell almost all the way to the ground, stunned, before recovering itself.
The dark man's Eye went east.
Now the highway below was I-70. The towns were huddled lumps, deserted except for the rats and the cats and the deer that had already begun to creep in from the forests as the scent of man washed away. Towns with names like Freemont and Green River and Sego and Thompson and Harley Dome. Then a small city, also deserted. Grand Junction, Colorado. Then -
Just east of Grand Junction was a spark of campfire.
The Eye spiraled down.
The fire was dying. There were four figures sleeping around it.
It was true, then.
The Eye appraised them coldly. They were coming. For reasons he could not fathom, they were actually coming. Nadine had told the truth.
There was a low growling, and the Eye turned in another direction. There was a dog on the far side of the campfire, its head lowered, its tail coiled down and over its privates. Its eyes glowed like baleful amber gems. Its growl was a constant thing, like endlessly ripping cloth. The Eye stared at it, and the dog stared back, unafraid. Its lip curled back and it showed its teeth.
One of the forms rose to a sitting position. "Kojak," it mumbled. "Will you for Chrissakes shut up?"
Kojak continued to growl, his hackles up.
The man who had awakened - it was Glen Bateman - looked around, suddenly uneasy. "Who's there, boy?" he whispered to the dog. "Is something there?"
Kojak continued to growl.
"Stu!" He shook the form next to him. The form muttered something and was silent again in its sleeping bag.
The dark man who was now the dark Eye had seen enough. He whirled upward, catching just a glimpse of the dog's neck craning up to follow him. The low growl turned into a volley of barks, loud at first, then fading, fading, gone.
Silence and rushing darkness.
Some unknown time later he paused over the desert floor, looking down at himself. He sank slowly, approaching the body, then sinking into himself. For a moment there was a curious sensation of vertigo, of two things merging into one. Then the Eye was gone and there were only his eyes, staring up at the cold and gleaming stars.
They were coming, yes.
Flagg smiled. Had the old woman told them to come? Would they listen to her if she, on her deathbed, instructed them to commit suicide in that novel way? He supposed it was possible that they would.
What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling: They were having their problems too, they were frightened too... and as a result, they were making a colossal mistake.
Was it even possible that they had been turned out?
He lingered lovingly over the idea but in the end could not quite believe it. They were coming of their own choice. They were coming wrapped in righteousness like a clutch of missionaries approaching the cannibals' village.
Oh, it was so lovely!
Doubts would end. Fears would end. All it would take was the sight of their four heads up on spikes in front of the MGM Grand's fountain. He would assemble every person in Vegas and make them file past and look. He would have photographs taken, would print fliers, have them sent out to LA and San Francisco and Spokane and Portland.
Five heads. He would put the dog's head up on a pole, too.
"Good doggy," Flagg said, and laughed aloud for the first time since Nadine had goaded him into throwing her off the roof. "Good doggy," he said again, grinning.
He slept well that night, and in the morning he sent out word that the watch on the roads between Utah and Nevada was to be tripled. They were no loner looking for one man going east but four men and a dog going west. And they were to be taken alive. Taken alive at all costs.
Oh, yes.
BOOK III THE STAND Chapter 72
"You know," Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, "I've heard the saying 'That sucks' for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know." He looked down at his breakfast, which consisted of Morning Star Farms synthetic sausage links, and grimaced.