The Stand (Original Edition)

by Stephen King

  For one strange second no one moved at all and Larry thought: They’re not going to do it, they’re as afraid of us as we are of them, more afraid, even though they have the guns—

  He looked at Burlson and said, “Who are you kidding, you little douchebag? We want to go. That’s why we came.”

  Then they moved, almost as though it was Larry who had ordered them. He and Ralph were bundled into the back of one cruiser, Glen into the back of the other. They were behind a steel mesh grille. There were no inside doorhandles.

  We’re arrested, Larry thought. He found that the idea amused him.

  Four men smashed into the front seat. The cruiser backed up, turned around, and began to head west. Ralph sighed.

  “Scared?” Larry asked him in a low voice.

  “I’ll be frigged if I know. It feels so good to be off m’dogs I can’t tell.”

  One of the men in front said: “The old man with the big mouth. He in charge?”

  “No. I am.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Larry Underwood. This is Ralph Brentner. The other guy is Glen Bateman.” He looked out the back window. The other cruiser was behind them.

  “What happened to the other guy?”

  “He broke his leg. We had to leave him.”

  “Tough go, all right. I’m Barry Dorgan. Vegas security.”

  Larry felt an absurd response, pleased to meet you, rise to his lips and had to smile a little. “How long a drive is it to Las Vegas?”

  “Well, we can’t whistle along too fast because of the stalls in the road. We’re clearing them out from the city, but it’s slow going. We’ll be there in about five hours.”

  “Isn’t that something,” Ralph said, shaking his head. “We’ve been on the road three weeks, and just five hours in a car takes you there.”

  Dorgan squirmed around until he could look at them. “I don’t understand why you were walking. For that matter I don’t understand why you came at all. You must have known it would end like this.” “We were sent,” Larry said. “To kill Flagg, I think.”

  “Not much chance of that, buddy. You and your friends are going right into the Las Vegas County Jail. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. He’s got a special interest in you. He knew you were coming.” He paused. “You just want to hope he makes it quick for you. But I don’t think he will. He hasn’t been in a very good mood lately.”

  “Why not?” Larry asked.

  But Dorgan seemed to feel he had said enough—too much, maybe. He turned around without answering, and Larry and Ralph watched the desert flow by. In just three weeks, speed had become a novelty all over again.

  It actually took them six hours to reach Vegas. It lay in the middle of the desert like some improbable gem. There were a lot of people on the streets; the workday was over, and people were enjoying the early evening cool on lawns and benches and at bus stops, or sitting in the doorways of defunct wedding chapels and hockshops. They rubbernecked the Utah S.P. cars as they went by and then went back to whatever they had been talking about.

  Larry was looking around thoughtfully. The electricity was on, the streets were cleared, and the rubble of looting was gone. “Glen was right,” he said. “He’s got the trains running on time. But still I wonder if this is any way to run a railroad. Your people all look like they’ve got the nervous complaint, Dorgan.”

  Dorgan didn’t reply. They arrived at the county jail and drove around to the rear. The two police cars parked in a cement courtyard. When Larry got out, wincing at the stiffness that had settled into his muscles, he saw that Dorgan had two sets of handcuffs.

  “Hey, come on,” he said. “Really.”

  “Sorry. His orders.”

  Ralph said, “I ain’t never been handcuffed in my life. I was picked up and throwed in the drunk tank a couple of times before I was married, but never was I cuffed.” Ralph was speaking slowly, his Oklahoma accent becoming more pronounced, and Larry realized he was totally furious.

  “I have my orders,” Dorgan said. “Don’t make it tougher than it is.”

  “Your orders,” Ralph said. “I know who gives your orders. He murdered my friend Nick. What are you doing hooked up with that hellhound? You seem like a nice enough fella when you’re by yourself.” He was looking at Dorgan with such an expression of angry interrogation that Dorgan shook his head and looked away.

  “This is my job,” he said, “and I have no intention of playing Twenty Questions with you. Put your wrists out or I’ll have somebody hold em out.”

  Larry put his hands out and Dorgan cuffed him. “What were you?” Larry asked curiously. “Before?”

  “Santa Monica Police. Detective second.”

  “And you’re with him. It’s . . . forgive me for saying so, but it’s really sort of funny.”

  Glen Bateman was pushed over to join them.

  “What are you shoving him around for?” Dorgan asked angrily.

  “If you had to listen to six hours of this guy’s bullshit, you’d do some pushing, too,” one of them said.

  “Keep your hands to yourself.” He looked at Larry. “Why is it funny that I should be with him? I was a cop for ten years before Captain Trips. I saw what happens when guys like you are in charge, you see.”

  “Young man,” Glen said mildly, “your experiences with a few battered babies and drug abusers does not justify your embrace of a monster.”

  “Get them out of here,” Dorgan said evenly. “Separate cells, separate wings.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be able to live with your choice, young man,” Glen said. “There doesn’t seem to be quite enough Nazi in you.”

  This time Dorgan pushed Glen himself.

  Larry was separated from the other two and taken down an empty corridor graced with signs reading NO SPITTING, THIS WAY TO SHOWERS & DELOUSING, and one that read, YOU ARE NOT A GUEST.

  “I wouldn’t mind a shower,” he said.

  “Maybe,” Dorgan said. “We’ll see.” “See what?”

  “How co-operative you can be.”

  Dorgan opened a cell at the end of the corridor and ushered Larry in.

  “How about the bracelets?” Larry asked, holding them out.

  “Sure.” Dorgan unlocked them and took them off. “Better?” “Much.”

  “Still want that shower?”

  “Yeah.” More than that, Larry didn’t want to be left alone. Alone, the fear would start to come back into him.

  Dorgan produced a small notebook. “How many are you? In the Zone?”

  “Six thousand,” Larry said. “We all play bingo every Thursday night and the prize in the coverall game is a twenty-pound turkey.” “Do you want that shower or not?”

  “I want it.” But no longer thought he was going to get it.

  “How many of you over there?”

  “Twenty-five thousand, but four thousand are under twelve and get in free at the drive-in. Economically speaking, it’s a bummer.” Dorgan snapped his notebook shut and looked at him.

  “I can’t, man,” Larry said.

  Dorgan shook his head. “Why are you guys here? What good do you think it’s going to do you? He’s going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day. And if he wants you to talk, you will. If he wants you to tapdance and jerk off at the same time, you’ll do that, too. You must be crazy.”

  “We were told to come by the old woman. Mother Abagail. Probably you dreamed about her.”

  Dorgan shook his head, but suddenly his eyes wouldn’t meet Larry’s. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Then let’s leave it at that.”

  “Sure you don’t want to talk to me? Get that shower?”

  Larry laughed. “I don’t work that cheap.”

  “Any way you want it,” Dorgan said. He walked back down the hallway under the mesh-enclosed lights. At the far end he stepped past a steel-barred gate that rolled shut behind him with a hollow crash.

  Larry looked around
. Like Ralph, he had been in jail on a couple of occasions—public intoxication once, possession of an ounce of marijuana on another. Flaming youth.

  “It’s not the Ritz,” he muttered. The mattress on the bunk looked decidedly moldy, and he wondered if someone had died on it back in June or early July. The toilet worked but filled with rusty water the first time he flushed it. Someone had left a paperback Western. Larry picked it up and then put it down again. He sat on the bunk and listened to the silence. He had always hated to be alone—but in a way, he always had been . . . until he had arrived in the Free Zone. And now it wasn’t so bad as he had been afraid it would be. Bad enough, but he could cope.

  He’s going to kill you dead as dogshit tomorrow or the next day.

  Except Larry didn’t believe it. It just wasn’t going to happen that way.

  “I will fear no evil,” he said into the dead silence of the cellblock wing, and he liked the way it sounded. He said it again.

  He lay down, and the thought occurred that he had finally made it most of the way back to the West Coast. But the trip had been longer and stranger than anyone ever could have imagined. And the trip wasn’t quite over yet.

  “I will fear no evil,” he said again. He fell asleep, his face calm, and he slept in dreamless peace.

  At ten o’clock the next day, twenty-four hours after they had first seen the roadblock in the distance, Randall Flagg and Lloyd Henreid came to see Glen Bateman.

  He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his cell. He had found a piece of charcoal under his bunk, and had just finished writing this legend on the wall amid the intaglio of male and female genitals, names, phone numbers, and obscene little poems: I am not the potter, nor the potter’s wheel, but the potter’s clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the Master’s skill? Glen was admiring this proverb—or was it an aphorism?—when the temperature in the deserted cellblock suddenly seemed to drop ten degrees. The door at the end of the corridor rumbled open. The saliva in Glen’s mouth was suddenly all gone, and the charcoal snapped between his fingers.

  Bootheels clocked up the hallway toward him. Other footfalls, smaller and insignificant, pattered along in counterpoint, trying to keep up.

  Why, it’s him. I’m going to see his face.

  Suddenly his arthritis was worse. Terrible, in fact. It seemed that his bones had suddenly been hollowed out and filled with ground glass. And still, he turned with an interested, expectant smile on his face as the bootheels stopped in front of his cell.

  “Well there you are,” Glen said. “And you’re not half the boogeyman we thought you must be.”

  Standing on the other side of the bars were two men. Flagg was on Glen’s right. He was wearing bluejeans and a white silk shirt that gleamed mellowly in the dim lights. He was grinning in at Glen. Beside him was a shorter man, who was not smiling at all. He had an undershot chin and eyes that seemed too big for his face. His complexion was one that the desert climate was never going to be kind to; he had burned, peeled, and burned again. Around his neck he wore a black stone flawed with red.

  “I’d like you to meet my associate,” Flagg said with a giggle. “Lloyd Henreid, meet Glen Bateman, sociologist, Free Zone Committee member, and single existing member of the Free Zone think tank now that Nick Andros is dead.”

  “Meetcha,” Lloyd mumbled.

  “How’s your arthritis, Glen?” Flagg asked. His tone was commiserating, but his eyes sparkled with high glee and secret knowledge.

  Glen opened and closed his hands rapidly, smiling back at Flagg. No one would ever know what an effort it took to maintain that gentle smile. The intrinsic worth of the clay! “Fine,” he said. “Much better for sleeping indoors, thank you.”

  Flagg’s smile faltered a bit. Glen caught just a glimpse of narrow surprise and anger. Of fear?

  “I’ve decided to let you go,” he said briskly. His smile sprang forth again, radiant and vulpine. Lloyd uttered a little gasp of surprise, and Flagg turned to him. “Haven’t we, Lloyd?”

  “Uh . . . sure,” Lloyd said. “Sure we have.”

  “Well, fine,” Glen said easily. He could feel the arthritis sinking deeper and deeper into his joints, numbing them like ice, swelling them like fire.

  “You’ll be given a small motorbike and you may drive back at your leisure.”

  “Of course I couldn’t go without my friends.”

  “No, of course not. And all you have to do is ask. Get down on your knees and ask me.”

  Glen laughed heartily. He threw back his head and laughed long and hard. And as he laughed, the pain in his joints began to abate. He felt better, stronger, in control again.

  “Oh, you’re a card,” he said. “I tell you what you do. Why don’t you find a nice big sandpile, get yourself a hammer, and pound all that sand right up your ass?”

  Flagg’s face grew dark. The smile slipped away. His eyes, previously as dark as the jet stone Lloyd wore, now seemed to gleam yellowly. He reached out his hand to the locking mechanism on the door and wrapped his fingers around it. There was an electric buzzing sound. Fire leaped out between his fingers, and there was a hot smell in the air. The lockbox fell to the floor, smoking and black. Lloyd Henreid cried out. The dark man grabbed the bars and threw the cell door back on its track.

  “Stop laughing.”

  Glen laughed harder.

  “Stop laughing at me!”

  “You’re nothing!” Glen said, wiping his streaming eyes and still chuckling. “Oh pardon me . . . it’s just that we were all so frightened ... we made such a business out of you . . . I’m laughing as much at our own foolishness as at your regrettable lack of substance

  “Shoot him, Lloyd.” Flagg had turned to the other man. His face was working horribly. His hands were hooked into predator’s claws.

  “Oh, kill me yourself if you’re going to kill me,” Glen said. “Surely you’re capable. Touch me with your finger and stop my heart. Make the sign of the inverted cross and give me a massive brain embolism. Bring down the lightning from the overhead socket to cleave me in two. Oh ... oh dear ... oh dear me!” Glen collapsed onto the cell cot and rocked back and forth, consumed with delicious laughter.

  “Shoot him!” the dark man roared at Lloyd.

  Pale, shaking with fear, Lloyd fumbled the pistol out of his belt, almost dropped it, then tried to point it at Glen. He had to use both hands.

  Glen looked at Lloyd, still smiling. He might have been at a faculty cocktail party back in the Brain Ghetto at Woodsville, New Hampshire, recovering from a good joke, now ready to turn the conversation back into more serious channels of reflection.

  “If you have to shoot somebody, Mr. Henreid, shoot him.”

  “Do it now, Lloyd.”

  Lloyd pulled the trigger. The gun went off with a tremendous crash in the enclosed space. The echoes bounced furiously back and forth. But the bullet only chipped concrete two inches from Glen’s right shoulder, ricocheted, struck something else, and whined off again.

  “Can’t you do anything?” Flagg roared. “Shoot him, you moron! Shoot him! He’s standing right in front of you!”

  “I’m trying—”

  Glen’s smile had not changed, and he had only flinched a little at the gunshot. “I repeat, if you must shoot somebody, shoot him. He’s really not human at all, you know. I once described him to a friend as the last magician of rational thought, Mr. Henreid. That was more correct than I knew. But he’s losing his magic now. It’s slipping away from him and he knows it. And you know it, too. Shoot him now and save us all God knows how much bloodshed and dying.”

  Flagg’s face had grown very still. “Shoot one of us, anyhow, Lloyd,” he said. “I got you out of jail when you were dying of starvation. It’s guys like this that you wanted to get back at. Little guys who talk big.”

  Lloyd said: “Mister, you don’t fool me. It’s like Randy Flagg says.”

  “But he lies. You know h
e lies.”

  “He told me more of the truth than anyone else bothered to in my whole lousy life,” Lloyd said, and shot Glen three times. Glen was driven backward, twisted and turned like a ragdoll. Blood flew in the dim air. He struck the cot, bounced, and rolled onto the floor. He managed to get up on one elbow.

  “It’s all right, Mr. Henreid,” he whispered. “You don’t know any better.”

  “Shut up!” Lloyd screamed. He fired again and Glen Bateman’s face disappeared. He fired again and the body jumped lifelessly. Lloyd shot him yet again. He was crying. The tears rolled down his angry, sunburned cheeks. He was remembering the rabbit he had forgotten and left to eat its own paws. He was remembering Poke, and the people in the white Connie, and Gorgeous George. He was remembering the Phoenix jail, and the rat, and how he hadn’t been able to eat the ticking out of his mattress. He was remembering Trask, and how Trask’s leg had started to look like a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner after a while. He pulled the trigger again, but the pistol only uttered a sterile click.

  “All right,” Flagg said softly. “All right. Well done. Well done, Lloyd.”

  Lloyd dropped the gun on the floor and shrank away from Flagg. “Don’t you touch me!” he cried. “I didn’t do it for you!”

  “Yes, you did,” Flagg said tenderly. “You may not think so, but you did.” He reached out and fingered the jet stone around Lloyd’s neck. He closed his hand over it, and when he opened the hand again, the stone was gone. It had been replaced with a small silver key.

  “I promised you, I think,” the dark man said. “In another jail. He was wrong ... I keep my promises, don’t I, Lloyd?”

  “Yes.”

  “The others are leaving, or planning to leave. I know who they are. I know all the names.”

  “Then why don’t you—”

  “Put a stop to it? I don’t know. Maybe it’s better to let them go. But you, Lloyd. You’re my good and faithful servant, aren’t you?”