"I don't believe she, was the one who sent us," Stu said quietly.
Larry's mileometer made four distinct little clicks as he set it for the day: 000.0. Stu doused what remained of the campfire with dirt. The little rituals of the morning went on. They had been twelve days on the road. It seemed to Stu that the days would go on forever like this: Glen bitching good-naturedly about the food, Larry noting their mileage on his dog-eared cheat sheet, the two cups of coffee, someone burying yesterday's scut, someone else burying the fire. It was routine, good routine. You forgot what it was all leading to, and that was good. In the mornings Fran seemed very distant to him - very clear, but very distant, like a photograph kept in a locket. But in the evenings, when the dark had come and the moon sailed the night, she seemed very close. Almost close enough to touch... and that, of course, was where the ache lay. At times like those his faith in Mother Abagail turned to bitter doubt and he wanted to wake them all up and tell them it was a fool's errand, that they had taken up rubber lances to tilt at a lethal windmill, that they had better stop at the next town, get motorcycles, and go back. That they had better grab a little light and a little love while they still could - because a little was all Flagg was going to allow them.
But that was at night. In the mornings it still seemed right to go on. He looked speculatively at Larry, and wondered if Larry thought about his Lucy late at night. Dreamed about her and wished...
Glen came back into camp with Kojak at his heel, wincing a little as he walked. "Let's go get em," - he said. "Right, Kojak?"
Kojak wagged his tail.
"He says Las Vegas or bust," Glen said. "Come on."
They climbed the embankment to I-70, now descending toward Grand Junction, and began their day's walk.
Late that afternoon, a cold rain began to fall, chilling them all and damping conversation. Larry walked by himself, hands shoved in his pockets. At first he thought about Harold Lauder, whose corpse they had found two days ago - there seemed to be an unspoken conspiracy among them not to talk about Harold - but eventually his thoughts turned to the person he had dubbed the Wolfman.
They had found the Wolfman just east of the Eisenhower Tunnel. The traffic was badly jammed up there, and the stink of death had been sickly potent. The Wolfman had been half in and half out of an Austin. He was wearing pegged jeans and a silk sequined Western shirt. The corpses of several wolves lay around the Austin. The Wolfman himself was half in and half out of the Austin's passenger seat, and a dead wolf lay on his chest. The Wolfman's hands were wrapped around the wolf's neck, and the wolf's bloody muzzle was angled up to the Wolfman's neck. Reconstructing, it seemed to all of them that a pack of wolves had come down out of the higher mountains, had spotted this lone man, and had attacked. The Wolfman had had a gun. He had dropped several of them before retreating to the Austin.
How long before hunger had forced him from his refuge?
Larry didn't know, didn't want to know. But he had seen how terribly thin the Wolfman had been. A week, maybe. He had been going west, whoever he was, going to join the dark man, but Larry would not have wished such a dreadful fate on anyone. He had spoken of it once to Stu, two days after they had emerged from the tunnel, with the Wolfman safely behind them.
"Why would a bunch of wolves hang around so long, Stu?"
"I don't know."
"I mean, if they wanted something to eat, couldn't they find it?"
"I'd think so, yeah."
It was a dreadful mystery to him, and he kept working it over in his mind, knowing he would never find the solution. Whoever the Wolfman had been, he hadn't been lacking in the balls department. Finally driven by hunger and thirst, he had opened the passenger door. One of the wolves had jumped him and torn his throat out. But the Wolfman had throttled it to death even as he himself died.
The four of them had gone through the Eisenhower Tunnel roped together, and in that horrible blackness, Larry's mind had turned to the trip he had made through the Lincoln Tunnel. Only now it was not images of Rita Blakemoor that haunted him but the face of the Wolfman, frozen in its final snarl as he and the wolf had killed each other.
Were the wolves sent to kill that man?
But that thought was too unsettling to even consider. He tried to push the whole thing out of his mind and just keep walking, but that was a hard thing to do.
They made their camp that night beyond Loma, quite close to the Utah state line. Supper consisted of forage and boiled water, as all their meals did - they were following Mother Abagail's instructions to the letter: Go in the clothes that you stand up in. Carry nothing.
"It's going to get bad in Utah," Ralph remarked. "I guess that's where we're going to find out if God really is watchin over us. There's one stretch, better than a hundred miles, without a town or even a gas station and a café." He didn't seem particularly disturbed by the prospect.