"How can we get back to Boulder in this?"
"We wait for spring," Stu said.
"That long?" Tom looked distressed, and Stu put an arm around the big man-boy's shoulders.
"The time will pass," he said, but even then he was not sure either of them would be able to wait that long.
Stu had been moaning and gasping in the darkness for some time. At last he gave a cry loud enough to wake himself up and came out of the dream to his Holiday Inn motel room up on his elbows, staring wide-eyed at nothing. He let out a long, shivery sigh and fumbled for the lamp by the bed table. He had clicked it twice before everything came back. It was funny, how hard that belief in electricity died. He found the Coleman lamp on the floor and lit that instead. When he had it going, he used the chamberpot. Then he sat down in the chair by the desk. He looked at his watch and saw it was quarter past three in the morning.
The dream again. The Frannie dream. The nightmare.
It was always the same. Frannie in pain, her face bathed in sweat. Richardson was between her legs, and Laurie Constable was standing nearby to assist him. Fran's feet were up in stainless-steel stirrups...
Push, Frannie. Bear down. You're doing fine.
But looking at George's somber eyes over the top of his mask, Stu knew that Frannie wasn't doing fine at all. Something was wrong. Laurie sponged off her sweaty face and pushed back her hair from her forehead.
Breech birth.
Who had said that? It was a sinister, bodiless voice, low and draggy, like a voice on a 45 rpm record played at 33 1/3.
Breech birth.
George's voice: You'd better call Dick. Tell him we may have to...
Laurie's voice: Doctor, she's losing a lot of blood now...
Stu lit a cigarette. It was terribly stale, but after that particular dream, anything was a comfort. It's an anxiety dream, that's all. You got this typical macho idea that things won't come right if you're not there. Well, bag it up, Stuart; she's fine. Not all dreams come true.
But too many of them had come true during the last half-year. The feeling that he was being shown the future in this recurring dream of Fran's delivery would not leave him.
He stubbed the cigarette out half-smoked and looked blankly into the gaslamp's steady glow. It was November 29; they had been quartered in the Grand Junction Holiday Inn for nearly four weeks. The time had passed slowly, but they had managed to keep amused with a whole town to plunder for diverting odds and ends.
Stu had found a medium-sized Honda electrical generator in a supply house on Grand Avenue, and he and Tom had hauled it back to the Convention Hall across from the Holiday Inn by putting it onto a sledge with a chainfall and then hooking up two Sno Cats to the sledge - moving it, in other words, in much the same way the Trashcan Man had moved his final gift for Randall Flagg.
"What are we gonna do with it?" Tom asked. "Get the electricity going at the motel?"
"This is too small for that," Stu said.
"What, then? What's it for?" Tom was fairly dancing with impatience.
"You'll see," Stu said.
They put the generator in the Convention Hall's electrical closet, and Tom promptly forgot about it - which was just what Stu had hoped for. The next day he went to the Grand Junction Sixplex by snowmobile, and using the sledge and the chainfall himself this time, he had lowered an old thirty-five-millimeter motion picture projector from the second-story window of the storage area where he had found it on one of his exploring trips. It had been wrapped in plastic... and then simply forgotten, judging by the dust which had gathered on the protective covering.
His leg was coming around nicely, but it had still taken him almost three hours to muscle the projector from the doorway of the Convention Hall into the center of the floor. He used three dollies and kept expecting Tom to happen by at any moment, looking for him. With Tom to pitch in, the work would have gone faster, but it also would have spoiled the surprise. But Tom was apparently off on business of his own, and Stu didn't see him all day. When he came into the Holiday Inn around five, apple-cheeked and wrapped in a scarf, the surprise was all ready.
Stu had brought back all six of the movies which had been playing in the Grand Junction Cinema complex. After supper that evening, Stu said casually: "Come on over to the Convention Hall with me, Tom."
"What for?"
"You'll see."
The Convention Hall faced the Holiday Inn across the snowy street. Stu handed Tom a box of popcorn at the doorway.
"What's this for?" Tom asked.
"Can't watch a movie without popcorn, you big dummy," Stu grinned.
"MOVIE? "
"Sure."
Tom burst into the Convention Hall. Saw the big projector set up, completely threaded. Saw the big convention movie screen pulled down. Saw two folding chairs set up in the middle of the huge, empty floor.