by Stephen King
“Sharp threads,” he murmured. “Heavy-heavy.” But there was no one to admire his taste.
He left the store and gunned the Harley into life. He supposed he should stop at the hardware store and see if they had a tent and another sleeping bag, but all he wanted now was to get out of Bennington. He would stop further up the line.
He looked up toward where the land made its slow rise as he guided the Harley out of town, and he could see Twelve-Mile Point, but not where they had pitched the tent. That was really all for the best, it was—
Larry looked back at the road and terror jumped nimbly down his throat. An International-Harvester pickup towing a horsetrailer had swerved to avoid a car and the horsetrailer had overturned. He was going to drive the Harley right into it because he hadn’t been looking where he was going.
He turned hard right, his new boot dragging on the road, and he almost got around. But the left footrest clipped the trailer’s rear bumper and yanked the bike out from under him. Larry came to rest on the highway’s verge with a bone-rattling thump. The Harley chattered on for a moment behind him and then stalled out.
“You all right?” he asked aloud. Thank God he’d only been doing twenty or so. Thank God Rita wasn’t with him, she’d be bullshit out of her mind with hysterics. Of course if Rita had been with him he wouldn’t have been looking up there in the first place, he would have been taking care of business so she wouldn’t get any more scared than necessary.
“I’m all right,” he answered himself, but he still wasn’t sure he was. He sat up. The quiet impressed itself upon him as it did from time to time, it was so quiet that if you thought about it you could go crazy. Even Rita bawling would have been a relief at this point. Everything seemed suddenly full of bright twinkles, and with sudden horror he thought he was going to pass out. He thought, I really am hurt, in just a minute I’ll feel it when the shock wears off, I’m cut bad or something, and who’s going to put on a tourniquet?
But when the instant of faintness had passed, he looked at himself and thought he was probably all right. He had cut both hands and his new pants had shredded away at the right knee—the knee was also cut—but they were all just scrapes and what the fuck was the big deal, anybody could dump their cycle, it happens to everybody once in a while.
But he knew what the big deal was. He could have hit his head the right way and fractured his skull and he would have lain there in the hot sun until he died.
He walked shakily over to the Harley and stood it up. It didn’t seem to be damaged in any way, but it looked different. Before it had just been a machine, a rather charming machine that could serve the dual purpose of transporting him and making him feel like James Dean or Jack Nicholson in Hell’s Angels on Wheels. But now its chrome seemed to grin at him like a sideshow barker, seeming to invite him to step right up and see if he was man enough to ride the two-wheeled monster.
It started on the third kick, and he putted out of Bennington at no more than walking speed. He was wearing bracelets of cold sweat on his arms and suddenly he had never, no never, in his whole life wanted so badly to see another human face.
Chapter 33
While Larry Underwood was taking his Fourth of July spill only a state away, Stuart Redman was sitting on a large rock at the side of the road and eating his lunch. He heard the sound of approaching engines. He finished his can of beer at a swallow and carefully folded over the top of the waxed-paper tube the Ritz crackers were in. His rifle was leaning against the rock beside him. He picked it up, flicked off the safety catch, and then put it down again, a little closer to hand. Motorcycles coming, small ones by the sound. Two-fifties? In this great stillness it was impossible to tell how far away they were. Ten miles, maybe, but only maybe. Plenty of time to eat more if he wanted to, but he didn’t. In the meantime, the sun was warm and the thought of meeting fellow creatures pleasant. He had seen no living people since leaving Glen Bateman’s house in Woodsville. He glanced at the rifle again. He had flicked the safety because the fellow creatures might turn out to be like Elder. He had left the rifle leaning against the rock because he hoped they would be like Bateman—only maybe not quite so glum about the future. Society will reappear, Bateman had said. Notice I didn’t use the word “reform” That would have been a ghastly pun. There’s precious little reform in the human race.
Bateman himself had seemed perfectly content—at least for the time being—to go for his walks with Kojak, paint his pictures, and think about the sociological ramifications of nearly total decimation.
If you come back this way and renew your invitation to “jine up,” Stu, I’ll probably agree. That is the curse of the human race. Sociability. What Christ should have said was "Yea, verily, whenever two or three of you are gathered together, some other guy is going to get the living shit kicked out of him.” Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell.
Show me a man or woman alone and I’11 show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent that charming thing we call “society." Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll re-invent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll re-invent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
Was that true? If it was, then God help them. Just lately Stu had been thinking a great deal about old friends and acquaintances. In his memory there was a great tendency to downplay or completely forget their unloveable characteristics—the way Bill Hapscomb used to pick his nose and wipe the snot on the sole of his shoe, Norm Bruett’s heavy hand with his kids, Billy Verecker’s unpleasant method of controlling the cat population around his house by crushing the thin skulls of the new kittens under the heels of his Range Rider boots.
The thoughts that came wanted to be wholly good. Going hunting at dawn, bundled up in quilted jackets and Day-Glo orange vests. Poker games at Ralph Hodges’s house and Willy Craddock always complaining about how he was four dollars in the game, even if he was twenty ahead. Six or seven of them pushing Tony Leominster’s Scout back onto the road that time he went down into the ditch drunk out of his mind, Tony staggering around and swearing to God and all the saints that he had swerved to avoid a U-Haul full of Mexican wetbacks. Jesus, how they had laughed. Chris Ortega’s endless stream of ethnic jokes. Going down to Huntsville for whores, and that time Joe Bob Brentwood caught the crabs and tried to tell everybody they came from the sofa in the parlor and not from the girl upstairs. They had been goddam good times. Not what your sophisticates with their nightclubs and their fancy restaurants and their museums would think of as good times, maybe, but good times just the same. He thought about those things, went over them and over them, the way an old recluse will lay out hand after hand of solitaire. Mostly he wanted to hear other human voices, get to know someone, be able to turn to someone and say, Did you see that? when something happened like the meteor shower he had watched the other night.
So he sat up a little straighter when the motorcycles finally swept around the bend, and he saw they were a couple of Honda 250s, ridden by a boy of about eighteen and a pretty girl who was maybe older than the boy. The girl was wearing a bright yellow blouse and light blue Levi’s.
They saw him sitting on the rock, and both Hondas swerved a little as their drivers’ surprise caused control to waver briefly. The boy’s mouth dropped open. For a moment it was unclear whether they would stop or just speed by heading west.
Stu raised an empty hand and said “Hi!” in an amiable voice. His heart was beating heavily in his chest. He wanted them to stop. They did.
For a moment he was puzzled by the tenseness in their postures. Particularly the boy; he looked as if a gallon of adrenalin had just been dumped into his blood. Of course Stu had a rifle, but he wasn’t holding it on them and they were armed themselves; he was weari
ng a pistol and she had a small deer-rifle slung across her back on a strap, like an actress playing Patty Hearst with no great conviction.
“I think he’s all right, Harold,” the girl said, but the boy she called Harold continued to stand astride his bike, looking at Stu with an expression of surprise and considering antagonism.
“I said I think—” she began again.
“How are we supposed to know that?”
“Well, I’m glad to see you, if that makes any difference,” Stu said.
“What if I don’t believe you?” Harold challenged, and Stu saw that he was scared green. Scared by him and by his responsibility to the girl.
Stu climbed off the rock. Harold’s hand jittered toward his holstered pistol.
“Harold, you leave that alone,” the girl said. Then she fell silent and for a moment they all seemed helpless to proceed further—a group of three dots which, when connected, would form a triangle whose exact shape could not yet be foreseen.
“Ouuuu,” Frannie said, easing herself down. “I’m never going to get the calluses off my fanny, Harold.”
Harold uttered a surly grunt.
She turned to Stu. “Have you ever ridden a hundred and seventy miles on a Honda, Mr. Redman? Not recommended.”
Stu smiled. “Where are you headed?”
“What business is it of yours?” Harold asked rudely.
“And what kind of attitude is that?” Fran asked him. “Mr. Redman is the first person we’ve seen since Gus Dinsmore died! I mean, if we didn’t come looking for other people, what did we come for?” “He’s watching out for you, is all,” Stu said quietly.
“That’s right, I am,” Harold said, unmollified.
“I thought we were watching out for each other,” she said, and Harold flushed darkly.
Stu thought: Give me three people and they’ll form a society. But were these the right two for his one? He liked the girl, but the boy impressed him as a frightened blowhard.
“We’re going to Stovington, Vermont,” Frannie said. “To the plague center there. We—what’s wrong? Mr. Redman?” He had gone pale all of a sudden, and the stem of grass he had been chewing fell onto his lap.
“Why there?” Stu asked.
“Because there happens to be an installation there for the studying of communicable diseases,” Harold said loftily. “It was my thought that, if there is any order left in this country, or any persons in authority who escaped the late scourge, they would likely be at Stovington or in Atlanta, where there is another such center.”
“That’s right,” Frannie said.
Stu said: “You’re wasting your time.”
Frannie looked stunned. Harold looked indignant; the red began to creep out of his collar again. “I hardly think you’re the best judge of that, my man.”
“I guess I am. I came from there.”
Now they both looked stunned. Stunned and astonished.
“You knew about it? Frannie asked, shaken. “You checked it out?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. It—”
“You’re a liar!” Harold’s voice had gone high and squeaky.
Fran saw an alarming cold flash of anger in Redman’s eyes, then they were brown and mild again. “No. I ain’t.”
“I say you are! I say you’re nothing but a—”
“Harold, you shut up!”
“But Frannie, how can you believe—”
“How can you be so rude and antagonistic?” she asked hotly. “Will you at least listen to what he has to say, Harold?”
“I don’t trust him.”
Fair enough, Stu thought, that makes us even.
“How can you not trust a man you just met? Really, Harold, you’re being disgusting!”
“Let me tell you how I know,” Stu said quietly. He told an abridged version of the story that began when Campion had crashed into Hap’s gas pumps. He sketched his escape from Stovington a week ago. Harold glared dully down at his hands, which were plucking up bits of moss and shredding them. But the girl’s face was like an unfolding map of a tragic country, and Stu felt bad for her. She had set off with this boy (who, to give him credit due, had had a pretty good idea) hoping against hope that there was something of the old ways left. Well, she had been disappointed. Bitterly so, from her look.
“Atlanta too? The plague got both of them?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, and she burst into tears.
He wanted to comfort her, but the boy would not take to that. Harold glanced uncomfortably at Fran, then down at the litter of moss on his cuffs. Stu gave her his handkerchief. She thanked him distractedly, without looking up. Harold glared sullenly at him again, the eyes those of a piggy little boy who wants the whole cookie jar to himself. Ain’t he going to be surprised, Stu thought, when he finds out a girl isn’t a jar of cookies.
When her tears had tapered down to sniffles, she said, “I guess Harold and I owe you our thanks. At least you saved us a long trip with disappointment at the end.”
“You mean you believe him? Just like that? He tells you a big story and you just. . . you buy it?”
“Harold, why would he lie? For what gain?”
“Well, how do I know what he’s got on his mind?” Harold asked truculently. “Murder, could be. Or rape.”
“I don’t believe in rape myself,” Stu said mildly. “Maybe you know something about it I don’t.”
“Stop it,” Fran said. “Harold, won’t you try not to be so awful?” “Awful?" Harold shouted. “I’m trying to watch out for you—us— and that’s so bloodydamn awful?"
“Look,” Stu said, and brushed his sleeve up. On the inside of his elbow were several healing needle marks and the last remains of a discolored bruise. “They injected me with all kinds of stuff.”
“Maybe you’re a junkie,” Harold said.
Stu rolled his sleeve back down without replying. It was the girl, of course. He had gotten used to the idea of owning her. Well, some girls could be owned and some could not. This one looked like the latter type. She was tall and pretty and very fresh-looking. Her dark eyes and hair accentuated a look that could be taken for dewy helplessness. It would be easy to miss that faint line (the 1-want line, Stu’s mother had called it) between her eyebrows that became so pronounced when she was put out, the swift capability of her hands, even the forthright way she tossed her hair from her forehead.
“So now what do we do?” she asked, ignoring Harold’s last contribution to the discussion entirely.
“Go on anyway,” Harold said, and when she looked over at him with that line furrowing her brow, he added hastily: “Well, we have to go somewhere. Sure, he’s probably telling the truth, but we could double-check. Then decide what’s next.”
Fran glanced at Stu. Stu shrugged.
“Okay?” Harold pressed.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter,” Frannie said. She picked up a gone-to-seed dandelion and blew away the fluff.
“You haven’t seen anyone at all?” Stu asked.
“No one.”
Stu told them about Bateman and Kojak. When he had finished he said, “I was going toward the coast, but you saying there aren’t any people back that way kind of takes the wind out of my sails.”
“Sorry,” Harold said, sounding anything but. He stood up. “Ready, Fran?”
She looked at Stu, hesitated, then stood up. “Back to the wonderful diet machine. Thank you for telling us what you know, Mr. Redman, even if the news wasn’t so hot.”
“Just a second,” Stu said, also standing up. He hesitated, wondering again if they were right. The girl was, but the boy surely was seventeen and afflicted with a bad case of the I-hate-most-everybodies. But were there enough people left to pick and choose? Stu thought not.
“I guess we’re both looking for people,” he said. “I’d like to tag along with you, if you’d have me.”
“No,” Harold said instantly.
Fran looked at Harold. “Maybe we—”
“You never m
ind. I say no.”
“Don’t I get a vote?”
“What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see he only wants one thing? Christ, Fran!”
“Three’s better than two if there’s trouble,” Stu said.
“No,” Harold repeated. His hand dropped to the butt of his gun. “Yes,” Fran said. “We’d be glad to have you, Mr. Redman.” Harold rounded on her, his face angry and hurt. “That’s the way you feel, is it? You were just waiting for some excuse to get rid of me, I get it.” He was so angry that tears had sprung to his eyes, and that made him angrier still. “If that’s the way you want it, okay. You go on with him. I’m done with you.” He stamped off toward where the Hondas were parked.
Frannie looked at Stu with stricken eyes, then turned toward Harold.
“Just a minute,” Stu said. “Stay here, please.” He trotted toward Harold, who was astride his Honda and trying to start it up. In his anger he had twisted the throttle all the way over and it was a good thing for him it was flooded, Stu thought; if it actually started up with that much throttle, it would rare back on its rear wheel like a unicycle and pile old Harold into the first tree and land on top of him.
“You stay away!” Harold screamed angrily at him, and his hand fell onto the butt of the gun again. Stu put his hand on top of Harold’s, as if they were playing slapjack. He put his other hand on Harold’s arm. Harold’s eyes were very wide, and Stu believed he was only an inch or so from becoming dangerous. He wasn’t just jealous of the girl, that had been a bad oversimplification on his part. His personal dignity was wrapped up in it, and his new image of himself as the girl’s protector. God knew what kind of a fuckup he had been before all of this, with his wad of belly and his pointy-toed boots and his stuck-up way of talking. But underneath the new image was the belief that he was still a fuckup and always would be. He would have reacted the same way to Bateman, or to a twelve-year-old kid. In any triangle situation he was going to see himself as the lowest point.