by Stephen King
He threw a sudden furious stare at the wolves and nearly half a dozen fell to fighting, their guttural sounds like ripping cloth in the stillness.
He knew all their secrets except... the third. Who was the third? He had sent the Eye out over and over again, and it afforded him with nothing but the cryptic, idiotic face of the moon. M-O-O-N, that spells moon.
Who was the third?
How had the girl been able to escape him? He had been taken utterly by surprise, left with nothing but a handful of her blouse. He had known about her knife, that had been child’s play, but not about that sudden leap at the window-wall. And the coldblooded way she had taken her own life, without a moment’s hesitation.
His thoughts chased each other like weasels in the dark. Things were getting just a trifle flaky around the edges. He didn’t like it.
Lauder, for instance. There was Lauder.
He had performed so excellently, like one of those little windup toys with a key sticking out of its back. Go here. Go there. Do this. Do that. But the dynamite bomb had only gotten two of them—all that planning, all that effort spoiled by that dying old nigger woman’s return. And then . . . after Harold had been disposed of ... he had nearly killed Nadine! He still felt a burst of amazed anger when he thought about it. And the dumb cunt had stood there with her mouth hanging open, waiting for him to do it again, almost as if she wanted to be killed. And who was going to end up with all this, if Nadine died?
Who, if not his son?
The rabbit was done. He slipped it off the spit and onto his tin plate.
“All right, all you asshole gyrenes, chow down!”
That made him grin. Had he been a marine once? He thought so.
Strictly the Parris Island variety, though. There had been a kid, a defective, name of Boo Dinkway. They had . . . what?
Flagg frowned down at his messkit. Had they beaten ole Boo into the ground with those padded poles? Scragged him somehow? He seemed to remember something about gasoline. But what?
In a sudden rage, he almost slung the freshly cooked rabbit into the fire. He should be able to remember that, goddammit!
“Chow down, grunts,” he whispered, but this time there was only a whiff of memory lane. He was losing himself. Once he had been able to look back over the sixties and seventies like a man looking down a double flight of stairs leading into a darkened room. Now he could only clearly remember the events since the superflu. Beyond that nothing but a haze that would sometimes lift a tiny bit, just enough to afford a glimpse of some enigmatic object or memory (Boo Dinkway, for instance ... if there ever had been such a person) before closing down again.
The earliest memory he could now be sure of was of walking south on US 51, heading toward Mountain City and the home of Kit Bradenton. He was no longer strictly a man, if he had ever been one. He was like an onion, slowly peeling away one layer at a time, only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away: organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will ... if there ever had been such a thing.
He began to eat the rabbit.
Once, he was quite sure, he would have done a quick fade when things began to get flaky. Not this time. This was his place, his time, and he would take his stand here. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t yet been able to uncover the third spy, or that Harold had gotten out of control at the end and had had the colossal effrontery to try to kill the bride who had been promised, the mother of his son.
Somewhere that strange Trashcan Man was in the desert, sniffing out the weapons that would eradicate the troublesome, worrisome Free Zone people forever. His Eye could not follow the Trashcan Man, and in some ways Flagg thought that Trash was stranger than he was himself, a kind of human bloodhound who sniffed cordite and napalm and gelignite with deadly radar accuracy.
In a month or less, the National Guard jets would be flying, with a full complement of Shrike missiles tucked under their wings. And when he was sure that the bride had conceived, they would fly east.
He looked dreamily up at the basketball moon and smiled.
There was one other possibility. He thought the Eye would show him, in time. He might go there, possibly as a crow, possibly as a wolf, possibly as an insect—a praying mantis, perhaps, something small enough to squirm through a carefully concealed vent cap in the middle of a spiky patch of desert grass. He would hop or crawl through dark conduits and finally slip through an air conditioner grille or a stilled exhaust fan.
The place was underground. Just over the border and into California.
There were beakers there, rows and rows of beakers, each with its own neat dymo tape identifying it: a super cholera, a super anthrax, a new and improved version of the bubonic plague, all of them based on the shifting-antigen ability that had made the superflu so almost universally deadly. There were hundreds of them in this place; assorted flavors, as they used to say in the Life Savers commercials.
How about a little in your water, Free Zone? How about a nice airburst? Some lovely Legionnaires’ Disease for Christmas? Randy Flagg, the black Santa, in his National Guard sleigh, with a little virus to drop down every chimney?
He would wait, and he would know at the right time.
No quick fade this time. He was on top and he was going to stay there. The rabbit was gone. Full of hot food, he felt himself again. He stood, tin plate in hand, and slung the bones out into the night. The wolves charged at them, fought over them, growling and biting and snarling, their eyes rolling blankly in the moonlight.
Flagg stood, hands on his hips, and roared laughter up at the moon.
Early the next morning Nadine headed down 1-15 again on her Vespa. Her snow-white hair, unbound, trailed out behind her, looking very much like a bridal train.
She felt sorry for the Vespa, which had served her so long and faithfully and which was now dying. Mileage and desert heat, the laborious crossing of the Rockies, and indifferent maintenance had all taken their toll. The engine now sounded hoarse and laboring. The RPM needle had begun to shudder instead of remaining docilely against the 5X1000 figure. It didn’t matter. If it died on her before she arrived, she would walk. No one was chasing her now. Harold was dead. And if she had to walk, he would know and send someone out to pick her up.
Harold had shot at her! Harold had tried to kill her!
Her mind kept returning to that no matter how she tried to avoid it. Her mind worried it like a dog worries a bone. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Flagg had come to her in a dream that first night after the explosion, when Harold finally allowed them to camp. He told her he was going to leave Harold with her until the two of them were almost into Utah. Then he would be removed in a quick, painless accident.
But it hadn’t been quick and painless, and Harold had almost killed her. The bullet had droned past within an inch of her cheek and still she had been unable to move. She had been frozen in shock, wondering how he could have done such a thing, how he could have been allowed to even try such a thing.
She had tried to tell herself it was Flagg’s way of throwing a scare into her. But it made no sense, it was crazy. Even if it had made some sort of sense, there was a firm, knowing voice inside her which said the shooting incident had just been something Flagg had not been prepared against. She tried to push the voice away, to bar the door against it the way a sane person will bar the door against an undesirable person with murder in his or her eyes. But she couldn’t do it. The voice told her she was alive through blind chance now. That Harold’s bullet could just as easily have gone between her eyes.
She called the voice a liar. Flagg knew everything, where the smallest sparrow had fallen—
No, that’s God, the voice replied implacably. God, he’s not. You’re alive through blind chance, and that means that all bets are off. You owe him nothing. You can turn around and go back, if you want to.
Go back, that was a laugh. The voice had little to say on that subject; she would have been surprised if it did. If the dark man’s feet were made of clay, she had
discovered the fact just a little late.
She tried to concentrate on the cool beauty of the desert morning instead of the voice. But the voice remained, low and insistent.
He didn’t know Harold was going to try to kill you . . . what else doesn’t he know? And will it be a clean miss next time?
But oh dear God, it was too late, by days and weeks and even years. Why had that voice waited until it was useless to speak up?
And as if in agreement, the voice finally fell silent and she had the morning to herself. She rode without thinking, her eyes fixed on the road unreeling in front of her. The road that led to Las Vegas. The road that led to him.
The Vespa died that afternoon. There was a grinding clank deep in its guts and the engine stalled. She could smell something hot and abnormal, like frying rubber, drifting up from the engine case. Her speed had dropped from the steady forty she had been maintaining until she had been putting along at walking speed. Now she trundled it over into the breakdown lane and cranked the starter a few times, knowing it was useless. She had killed it. She had killed a lot of things on her way to her husband. She had been responsible for wiping out the entire Free Zone Committee and all of their invited guests to that final explosive meeting. And then there was Harold. Also, say-hey and by the way, let’s not forget Fran Goldsmith’s unborn baby.
That made her feel sick. She stumbled over to the guardrail and tossed up her light lunch. She felt hot, sick, and delirious, the only living thing in a sunstruck desert nightmare. It was hot... so hot.
She turned back, wiping her mouth. The Vespa lay on its side like a dead animal. Nadine looked at it for a few moments and then began to walk. She had already passed Dry Lake. That meant she would have to sleep by the road tonight if no one picked her up. With any luck she would reach Las Vegas in the morning. And suddenly she was sure that the dark man would let her walk. She would reach Las Vegas hungry and thirsty and burning with the desert heat, every last bit of the old life flushed from her system. The woman who had taught small children at a private school in New England would be gone, as dead as Napoleon.
She walked, and the afternoon advanced. Sweat rolled down her face. Quicksilver glimmered, always at the point where the highway met the faded-denim sky. She unbuttoned her light blouse and took it off, walking in her white cotton bra. Sunburn? So what? Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a fuck.
By dusk she had gone a terrible shade of red that was nearly purple along the raised ridges of her collarbones. The cool of the evening came suddenly, making her shiver, and making her remember that she had left her camping gear with the Vespa.
She looked around doubtfully, seeing cars here and there, some of them buried in drifting sand up to their hood ornaments. The thought of sheltering in one of those tombs made her feel sick—even sicker than her terrible sunburn was making her feel. She decided she would walk all night rather than sleep in one of those cars. If this were only the Midwest again. She could have found a barn, a haystack, a field of clover. A clean, soft place. Out here there was only the road, the sand, the baked hardpan of the desert.
She brushed her long hair away from her face and dully realized that she wished she was dead.
Now the sun was below the horizon, the day perfectly poised between light and dark. The wind that now slipped over her was dead cold. She looked around herself, suddenly afraid.
It was too cold.
The buttes had become dark monoliths. The sand dunes were like ominous toppled colossi. Even the spiny stands of saguro were like the skeletal fingers of the accusing dead, poking up out of the sand from their shallow graves.
Overhead, the cosmic wheel of the sky.
A snatch of lyric occurred to her, an Eagles song, suddenly frightening: And I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight. . . with a million stars all around . . .
Suddenly she knew he was there. Even before he spoke.
“Nadine.” His soft voice, coming out of the growing darkness. Infinitely soft, the final enveloping terror that was like coming home.
“Nadine, Nadine . . . how I love to love Nadine.”
She turned around and there he was, as she had always known he would be someday. He was sitting on the hood of an old Chevrolet sedan, his legs crossed, his hands laid lightly on the knees of his faded jeans. Looking at her and smiling gently. But his eyes were not gentle at all. They gave lie to the idea that this man felt anything gentle. In them she saw a black glee that danced endlessly like the legs of a man fresh through the trapdoor in a gibbet platform.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m here.”
“Yes. At last you’re here. As promised.” His smile broadened and he held his hands out to her. She took them, and as she reached him she felt his baking heat. He radiated it, like a well-stoked brick oven. His smooth, lineless hands slipped around hers . . . and then closed over them tight, like handcuffs.
“Oh, Nadine,” he whispered, and bent to kiss her. She turned her head just a little, looking up at the cold fire of the stars, and his kiss was on the hollow below her jaw rather than on her lips. He wasn’t fooled. She felt the mocking curve of his grin against her flesh.
He revolts me, she thought.
But revulsion was only a scaly crust over something worse—a caked and long-hidden lust, an ageless pimple finally brought to a head and about to spew forth some noissome fluid, some sweetness long since curdled. His hands, slipping over her back, were much hotter than her sunburn. She moved against him, and suddenly the slim saddle between her legs seemed plumper, fuller, more tender, more aware. The seam of her slacks was chafing her in a delicately obscene way that made her want to rub herself, get rid of the itch, cure it once and for all.
“Tell me one thing,” she said.
“Anything.”
“You said, ‘As promised.’ Who promised me to you? Why me? And what do I call you? I don’t even know that. I’ve known about you for most of my life, and I don’t know what to call you.”
“Call me Richard. That’s my real name. Call me that.”
“Richard?” she asked doubtfully, and he giggled against her neck, making her skin crawl with loathing and desire. “And who promised me?”
“Nadine,” he said, “I have forgotten. Come on.”
He slipped off the hood of the car, still holding her hands, and she almost jerked them away and ran . . . but what good would that have done? He would only chase after her, catch her, rape her.
“The moon,” he said. “It’s full. And so am I.” He brought her hand down to the smooth and faded crotch of his jeans and there was something terrible there, beating with a life of its own beneath the notched coldness of his zipper.
“No,” she muttered, and tried to pull her hand away, thinking how far this was from that other moonstruck night, how impossibly far. This was at the other end of time’s rainbow.
He held her hand against him. “Come out in the desert and be my wife,” he said.
“No!”
“It’s much too late to say no, dear.”
She went with him. There was a bedroll, and the blackened bones of a campfire under the silver skull of the moon.
He laid her down.
“All right,” he breathed. His fingers worked his belt buckle, then the button, then the zipper.
She saw what he had and began to scream.
His grin sprang forth at the sound, huge and glittering and obscene
in the night, and the moon stared down blankly, bloated and cheesy.
Nadine pealed forth scream after scream and tried to crawl away and he grabbed her and then she was holding her legs shut with all her strength, and when one of those blank hands inserted itself between them they parted like water and she thought: / will look up ... I will look up at the moon ... I will feel nothing and it will be
over ... it will be over ... I will feel nothing . . .
And when the dead coldness of him slipped into her the shriek ripped up and out of her, bolted free, and she struggled, and
the struggle was useless. He battered into her, invader, destroyer, and the cold blood gushed down her thighs and then he was in her, all the way up to her womb, and the moon was in her eyes, cold and silver fire, and when he came it was like molten iron, molten pig iron, molten brass, and she came herself, came in screaming, incredible pleasure, came in terror, in horror, passing through the pig iron and brass gates into the desert land of insanity, chased through, blown through like a leaf by the bellowing of his laughter, watching his face melt away, and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous nighttowns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid. He went again . . . and again ... and again. It seemed he would never be used up. Cold. He was dead cold. And old. Older than mankind, older than the earth. Again and again he filled her with his nightspawn, screaming laughter. Earth. Light. Coming. Coming again. The last shriek coming out of her to be wiped away by the desert wind and carried into the furthest chambers of the night, out to where a thousand weapons waited for their new owner to come and claim them. Shaggy demon’s head, a lolling tongue deeply split into two forks. Its dead breath fell on her face. She was in the land of insanity now. The iron gates were closed.
The moon—!
The moon was almost down.
He had caught another rabbit, had caught the trembling little thing in his bare hands and had broken its neck. He had built a new fire on the bones of the old one and now the rabbit cooked, sending up savory ribbons of aroma. There were no wolves now. It was, after all, his wedding night, and the dazed and apathetic thing sitting lumpishly on the other side of the fire was his blushing bride.
He leaned over and raised her hand out of her lap. When he let it go it stayed in place, raised to the level of her mouth. He looked at this phenomenon for a moment and then put her hand back in her lap. He poked two fingers at her eyes, and she did not blink. That blank stare just went on and on.