by Stephen King
A new sound in the rainy afternoon.
Bobby Terry’s head jerked up.
The rain, yes, making its steel drum sound on the cabs of the two vehicles, and the grumbling of two idling motors, and—
A strange clocking sound, like rundown bootheels hammering swiftly along the secondary road macadam.
“No,” Bobby Terry whispered.
He began to turn around.
The clocking sound was speeding up. A fast walk, a trot, a jog, run, sprint, and Bobby Terry got all the way around, too late, he was coming, Flagg was coming like some terrible horror monster out of the scariest picture ever made. The dark man’s cheeks were flushed with jolly color, and his eyes were twinkling with happy good fellowship, and a great hungry voracious grin stretched his lips over huge tombstone teeth, shark teeth, and his hands were held out in front of him, and there were shiny black crowfeathers fluttering from his hair. No, Bobby Terry tried to say, but nothing came out.
“HEY BOBBY TERRY, YOU SCROOOOWED IT UP!” The dark man bellowed, and fell upon the hapless Bobby Terry.
There were worse things than crucifixion.
There were teeth.
Chapter 52
Dayna Jurgens lay naked in the huge double bed, listening to the steady hiss of water coming from the shower, and looked up at her reflection in the big circular ceiling mirror, which was the exact shape and size of the bed it reflected. She thought that the female body always looks its best when it is flat on its back, stretched out, the tummy pulled flat, the breasts naturally upright without the vertical drag of gravity to pull them down. It was nine-thirty in the morning, September 8. The Judge had been dead about eighteen hours, Bobby Terry considerably less—unfortunately for him.
The shower ran on and on.
There's a man with a cleanliness compulsion, she thought. / wonder what happened to him that makes him want to shower for half an hour at a stretch?
Her mind turned back to the Judge. Who would have figured that? In its own way, it was a damned brilliant idea. Who would have suspected an old man like that? But Flagg had known. Somehow he had known when and approximately where. A picket line had been set up all the way along the Idaho-Oregon border, with orders to kill him.
But the job had been botched somehow. Since suppertime last night, the upper echelon here in Las Vegas had been walking around with pasty faces and downcast eyes. Whitney Horgan, who was one damned fine cook, had served something that looked like dog food and was too burned to taste like much of anything. The Judge was dead, but something had gone wrong.
She got up and walked to the window and looked out over the desert. She saw two big Las Vegas High School buses trundling west on US 95 in the hot sunshine, headed out toward the Indian Springs air-base where, she knew, a daily seminar in the art and craft of jet planes went on. There were over a dozen people in the west who
knew how to fly, but by great good luck—for the Free Zone—none of them were checked out for the National Guard jets at Indian Springs.
But they were learning. Oh my, yes.
What was most important for her right now about the Judge’s demise was that they had known when they had no business knowing. A spy on the Free Zone Committee seemed to be the only logical answer, but she just didn’t believe that. That left a very unappetizing alternative. Flagg himself had just known.
Dayna had been in Las Vegas eight days as of today, and as far as she could tell she was a fully accepted member of the community. She had already accumulated enough information about the operation over here to scare the living Jesus out of everyone back in Boulder. It would only take the news about the jet plane training program to do that. But the thing that frightened her the most personally was the way people turned away from you if you mentioned Flagg’s name, the way they pretended they hadn’t heard. Some of them would cross their fingers, or genuflect, or make the sign of the evil eye behind one cupped hand. He was the great There/Not-There.
That was by day. By night, if you would just sit quietly by in the Cub Bar of the Grand or the Silver Slipper Room at The Cashbox, you heard stories about him, the beginning of myth. They talked slowly, haltingly, not looking at each other, drinking bottles of beer mostly. If you drank something stronger, you might lose control of your mouth, and that was dangerous. She knew that not all of what they said was the truth, but it was already impossible to separate the gilt embroidery from the whole cloth. She had heard he was a shape-changer, a were-wolf, that he had started the plague himself, that he was the Antichrist whose coming was foretold in Revelation.
And he was never referred to as Flagg in these nightly discussions; it was as if they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle. They called him the dark man. The Walkin Dude. The black guy. And Ratty Erwins called him Old Creeping Judas.
If he had known about the Judge, didn’t it stand to reason that he knew about her?
The shower turned off.
Keep it together, sweetie. He encourages the mumbo-jumbo. It makes him look taller. It could be that he does have a spy in the Free Zone—it wouldn’t necessarily have to be someone on the committee, just someone who told him Judge Farris wasn’t the defector type.
“You shouldn’t walk around like that with no clothes on, sweetbuns. You’ll get me homy all over again.”
She turned toward him, her smile rich and inviting. “Why do you think I was walking around with no clothes on?”
He looked at his watch. “Well, we got maybe forty minutes.” His penis was already beginning to make twitching movements . . . like a divining rod, Dayna thought with sour amusement.
“Well, come on then.” He came toward her and she pointed at his chest. “And take that thing off. It gives me the creeps.”
Lloyd Henreid looked down at the amulet, dark teardrop marked with a single red flaw, and slipped it off. He put it on the night table and the fine-linked chain made a little hissing sound. “Better?”
“All kinds of better.” She held out her arms.
Afterward, as she had hoped, Lloyd talked. That was part of his rhythm, too. He would put an arm around her bare shoulders, smoke a cigarette, look up at their reflections in the mirror over the bed, and tell her what was going on.
“Glad I wasn’t that Bobby Terry,” he said. “No sir, no way. The main man wanted that old fart’s head without so much as a bruise on it. Wanted to send it back over the Rockies. And look what happened. That numbnuts puts two .45 slugs into his face.”
“W^hat happened to him?”
“Sweetbuns, don’t ask.”
“How did he know? The big guy?”
“He was there.”
She felt a chill.
“Just happened to be there?”
“Yeah. He just happens to be anywhere that there’s trouble. Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to L.A. with . . .”
“What did he do?”
For a long time she didn’t think he was going to answer. Usually she could gently push him in the direction she wanted him to go by asking a series of soft, respectful questions; making him feel as if he was (in the never-to-be-forgotten words of her kid sister) king shit of Turd Mountain. But this time she had a feeling she had pushed too far until Lloyd said in a funny, squeezed voice:
“He just looked at him. Eric was laying down all this funky shit about how he wanted to see the Vegas operation run ... we should do this, we should do that. Poor old Trash—he ain’t all the way together himself, you know—was just staring at him like he was a TV actor or something. Eric’s pacing back and forth like he’s addressing a jury and like it was already proved he was going to get his own way. And he says—real soft—‘Eric.’ Like that. And Eric looked at him. I didn’t see nothing. But Eric just looked at him for a long time. Maybe five minutes. His eyes just got bigger and bigger . . . and then he started to drool . . . and then he started to giggle . . . and he giggled right along with Eric, and
that scared me. When Flagg laughs, you get scared. But Eric just kept right on giggling, and then he said, ‘When you go back, drop him off in the Mojave.’ And that’s what we did. And for all I know, Eric’s wandering around out there right now. He looked at Eric for five minutes and drove him out of his mind.”
He took a large drag on his cigarette and crushed it out. “Why are we talkin about bad shit like that?”
“I don’t know . . . how’s it going out at Indian Springs?”
Lloyd brightened. The Indian Springs project was his baby. “Good. Real good. We’re going to have three guys checked out on the Skyhawk planes by the first of October, maybe sooner. Hank Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he’s a fucking genius. About some things he’s not too bright, but when it comes to weapons, he’s incredible.”
She had met Trashcan Man twice. Both times she had felt a chill slip over her when his strange, muddy eyes happened to light upon her, and a palpable sense of relief when those eyes passed on. It was obvious that many of the others—Lloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man—saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck charm. One of his arms was a horrid mass of freshly healed bum tissue, and she remembered something peculiar that had happened two nights ago. Hank Rawson had been talking. He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, and finished what he was saying before lighting the cigarette and shaking out the match. Dayna saw the way that Trashcan Man’s eyes homed on the matchflame, the way his breathing seemed to stop. It was as if his whole being had focused on the tiny flame. It was like watching a starving man contemplate a nine-course dinner. Then Hank shook out the match and dropped the blackened stub into an ashtray. The moment had ended.
“He’s good with weapons?” She asked Lloyd.
“He’s great with them. The Skyhawks have underwing missiles, air-to-ground. Shrike missiles. Weird how they name all that shit, isn’t it? No one could figure out how the goddam things went on the planes. No one could figure out how to arm them or safety control them. Christ, it took us most of one day to figure out how to get them off the storage racks. So Hank says, ‘We better get Trashy out here when he gets back and see if he can figure it out.’ ”
“When he gets back?”
“Yeah, he’s a funny dude. He’s been in Vegas almost a week now, but he’ll be taking off again pretty quick.”
“Where does he go?”
“Into the desert. He takes a Land-Rover and just goes. He’s a strange guy, I tell you. In his way, Trash is almost as strange as the big guy himself. West of here there’s nothing but empty desert and Godforsaken waste. I ought to know. I did time way up west in a hellhole called Brownsville Station. I don’t know how he lives out there, but he does. He looks for new toys, and he always comes back with a few. About a week after him and me got back from L.A., he brought back a pile of army machine guns with laser sights—never-miss machine guns, Hank calls them. This last time it was Teller mines, contact mines, fragment mines, and a canister of parathion. He said he found a whole stockpile of parathion. Also enough defoliant to turn the whole state of Colorado bald as an egg.”
“Where does he find it?”
“Everywhere,” Lloyd said simply. “He sniffs it out, sweetbuns. It isn’t really so strange. Most of western Nevada and eastern California was owned by the good old U.S.A. It’s where they tested their toys, all the way up to A-bombs. He’ll be dragging one of those back someday.” He laughed. Dayna felt cold, terribly cold. “The superflu started somewhere out here. I’d lay money on it. Maybe Trash will find it. I tell you, he just sniffs that stuff out. The big guy says just give him his head and let him run, and that’s what he does. You know what his favorite toy is right now?”
“No,” Dayna said.
“Flametracks. He’s got five of them out at Indian Springs, lined up like Formula One racecars.” Lloyd laughed. “They used them in Nam. The grunts called them Zippos. They’re full of napalm. Trash loves em.”
“Neato,” she muttered.
“Anyway, when Trash came back this time, we took him out to the Springs. He hummed and muttered around those Shrikes and got them armed and mounted in about six hours. Can you believe that?
They train Air Force technicians about ninety years to do stuff like that. But they’re not Trash, you see. He’s a fucking genius.”
Idiot savant, you mean. I bet I know how he got those burns, too.
Lloyd looked at his watch and sat up. “Speaking of Indian Springs, I got to get out there. Just got time for another shower. You want to join me?”
“Not this time.”
She got dressed after the shower began to run again. So far she had always managed to get dressed and undressed with him out of the room, and that was the way she intended to keep it.
She strapped the clip to her forearm and slid the switchblade knife into its spring-loaded clasp. A quick twice of her wrist would deliver all ten inches of it into her hand.
Well, she thought as she slipped into her blouse, a girl has to have some secrets.
During the afternoons, she was on a streetlamp maintenance crew. What the job amounted to was testing the bulbs with a simple gadget and replacing them if they had burned out, or if they had been broken by vandals when Las Vegas had been in the grip of the superflu. There were four of them on the job, and they had a cherry-picker truck that trundled around from post to post and street to street.
Late that afternoon, Dayna was up in the cherry-picker, removing the Plexiglas hood from one of the streetlamps and musing on how much she liked the people she was working with, particularly Jenny Engstrom, a tough and beautiful ex-nightclub dancer who was now running the cherry-picker’s controls. She was the type of girl Dayna would have wanted for her best friend, and it confused her that Jenny was over here, on the dark man’s side. It confused her so much that she didn’t dare ask Jenny for an explanation.
The others were also okay. She thought that Vegas had a rather larger proportion of stupids than the Zone, but none of them wore fangs, and they didn’t turn into bats at moonrise. They were also people who worked much harder than she remembered the people in the Zone working. In the Free Zone you saw people idling in the parks at all hours of the day, and there were people who decided to break for lunch from noon until two. That sort of thing didn’t happen over here. From 8 A.M. to 5 P.M., everybody was working, either at Indian Springs or on maintenance crews here in town. And school had started again. There were about twenty kids in Vegas, ages ranging from four (that was Daniel McCarthy, the pet of everyone in town, known as Dinny), up to fifteen. They had found two people with teaching certificates, and classes went on five days a week. Lloyd, who had quit school after repeating his junior year for the third time, was very proud of the educational opportunities that were being provided. The pharmacies were open and unguarded. People came and went all the time ... but with nothing heavier than a bottle of aspirin or Gelusil. There was no drug problem in the west. The penalty for a habit was crucifixion. There were no Rich Moffats, either. Everyone was friendly and straight. And it was wise to drink nothing stronger than bottled beer.
Germany in 1938, she thought. The Nazis? Oh, they're charming people. Very athletic. They don’t go to the nightclubs, the nightclubs are for the tourists. What do they do? They make clocks.
She tested the bulb in the hood of the fight standard. It was bad. She removed it, set it carefully between her feet, and got the last fresh one. Good, it was near the end of the day. It was—
She glanced down and froze.
People were coming back from the bus stop, headed home from Indian Springs. All of them were glancing up casually, the way a group of people always glance up at someone high in the air. The circus-for-free syndrome.
That face, looking up at her.
That wide, smiling, wondering face.
Dear sweet Jesus in heaven, is that Tom Cullen?
A dribble of salt-stinging sweat ran into her eye, doubling her vision. When she wiped it away, the face was g
one. The people from the bus stop were halfway down the street, swinging their lunch buckets, talking and joking. Dayna gazed at the one she thought it was, but from the rear it was so hard to tell—
Tom? Would they send Tom?
Surely not. That was so crazy it was almost—
Almost sane.
But she just couldn’t believe it.
“Hey Jurgens!” Jenny called up brassily. “Did you fall asleep up there, or are you just playing with yourself?”
Dayna leaned over the cherry-picker’s low railing and looked down at Jenny’s upturned face. Gave her the finger. Jenny laughed. Dayna went back to her streetlamp bulb, struggling to snap it in, and by the time she had it right, it was time to knock off for the day. On the ride back to the garage, she was quiet and preoccupied.
It couldn’t have been Tom.
Could it?
“Wake up! Wake up! Goddammit, wake up, you bitch!”
She was coming out of murky sleep when a foot caught her in the small of the back, knocking her out of the big round bed and onto the floor. She came awake at once, blinking and confused.
Lloyd was there, looking down at her with cold anger. Whitney Horgan. Ken DeMott. Ace High. Jenny. Only Jenny’s usually open face was also blank and cold.
“Jen—?”
No answer. Dayna got up on her knees, dimly aware of her nakedness, more aware of the cold circle of faces looking down at her. The expression on Lloyd’s face was that of a man who has been betrayed and has discovered the betrayal.
“Get the fuck dressed, you lying, spying bitch!”
She felt a sinking terror in her stomach that seemed almost preordained. They had known about the Judge, and now they knew about her. He had told them. She glanced at the clock on the night table. It was quarter of four in the morning.