by Stephen King
“Heard something.”
Tom took the first package and unwrapped it carefully—a pinball machine encased in Lucite, a new gadget all the kids had been yelling for the Christmas before, complete with two-year coin batteries. Tom’s eyes lit up when he saw it. “Turn it on,” Stu said.
“Naw, I want to see what else I got.”
There was a sweatshirt with a winded skier on it, resting on crooked skis and propping himself up with his ski poles.
“It says I CLIMBED LOVELAND PASS. We haven’t yet, but we’re gettin there.”
Tom promptly stripped off his parka, put the sweatshirt on, and then replaced his parka. “Great! Great, Stu!”
The last package, the smallest, contained a simple silver medallion on a fine-link silver chain. To Tom it looked like the number 8 lying on its side. He held it up in puzzlement and wonder.
“What is it, Stu?”
“It’s a Greek symbol. I remember it from a long time ago, on a doctor program called ‘Ben Casey.’ It means infinity, Tom. Forever.” He reached across to Tom and held the hand that held the medallion. “I think maybe we’re going to get to Boulder, Tommy. I think we were meant to get there from the first. I’d like you to wear that, if you don’t mind. And if you ever need a favor and wonder who to ask, you look at that and remember Stuart Redman. All right?”
“Infinity,” Tom said, turning it over in his hand. “Forever.”
He slipped the medallion over his neck.
“I’ll remember that,” he said. “Tom Cullen’s gonna remember that.”
“Shit! I almost forgot!” Stu reached back into his shelter half and brought out another package. “Merry Christmas, Kojak! Just let me open this for you.” He took off the wrappings and produced a box of Hartz Mountain Dog Yummies. He scattered a handful on the snow, and Kojak gobbled them up quickly. He came back to Stu, wagging his tail hopefully.
“Later,” Stu said, pocketing the box. “Christmas comes but once a year, big fella.”
Tom said hesitantly: “Can I sing a song before we go?”
“Sure, if you want.” Stu rather expected “Jingle Bells” or “Frosty the Snowman” sung in the offkey and rather toneless voice of a child. But what came out was a fragment of “The First Noel,” sung in a surprisingly pleasant tenor voice.
“The first Noel,” Tom’s voice drifted across the white wastes, echoing back with faint sweetness, “the angels did say . . . was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay . . . In fields ... as they ... lay keeping their sheep ... on a cold winter’s night that was so deep . . .”
Stu joined in on the chorus, his voice not as good as Tom’s but mixing well enough to suit the two of them, and the old sweet hymn drifted back and forth in the deep cathedral silence of Christmas morning:
“Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel. . . Christ is born in Israel . . .” “That’s the only part of it I can remember,” Tom said a little guiltily as their voices drifted away.
“It was fine,” Stu said. He felt a little bit like crying with sudden homesickness. “We ought to get going. Daylight’s wasting.”
“Sure.” He looked at Stu, who was taking down his shelter half. “It’s the best Christmas I ever had, Stu.”
“I’m glad, Tommy.”
And shortly after that they were under way again, traveling east and upward under the bright cold Christmas Day sun.
They camped near the summit of Loveland Pass that night, nearly 12,000 feet above sea level. They slept three in a shelter as the temperature slipped down to twenty degrees below zero. The wind swept by endlessly, cold as the flat blade of a honed kitchen knife, and in the high shadows of the rocks with the lunatic starsprawl of winter seeming almost close enough to touch, the wolves howled. The world seemed to be one gigantic crypt below them, both east and west.
Early the next morning, before first light, Kojak woke them up with his barking. Stu crawled to the front of the shelter half, his rifle in hand. For the first time the wolves were visible. They had come down from their places and sat in a rough ring around the camp, not howling now, only looking. Their eyes held deep green glints, and they all seemed to grin heartlessly.
Stu fired six shots at random, scattering them. One of them leaped high and came down in a heap. Kojak trotted over to it, sniffed at it, then lifted his leg and urinated on it.
“The wolves are still his,” Tom said. “They always will be.”
Tom still seemed half asleep. His eyes were drugged and slow and dreamy.
“Tom . . . is he dead? Do you know?”
“He never dies,” Tom said. “He’s in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He’s blind like them.”
“Will he be back?” Stu asked urgently. He felt cold all over.
Tom didn’t answer.
“Tommy . .
“Tom’s sleeping. He went to see the elephant.”
“Tom, can you see Boulder?”
Outside, a bitter white line of dawn was coming up in the sky against the jagged, sterile mountaintops.
“Yes. They’re waiting. Waiting for some word. Waiting for spring. Everything in Boulder is quiet.”
“Can you see Frannie?”
Tom’s face brightened. “Frannie, yes. She’s fat. She’s going to have a baby, I think. She stays with Lucy Swann. Lucy’s going to have a baby, too. But Frannie will have her baby first. Except . . Tom’s face grew dark.
“Tom? Except what?”
“The baby . .
“What about the baby?"
Tom looked around uncertainly. “We were shooting wolfs, weren’t we? Did I fall asleep, Stu?”
Stu forced a smile. “A little bit, Tom.”
“I had a dream about an elephant. Funny, huh?”
“Yeah.” What about the baby? What about Fran?
He began to suspect they weren’t going to be in time; that whatever Tom had seen would happen before they could arrive.
The good weather broke three days before the New Year, and they had to stop for two days in the small town of Kittredge. They were close enough to Boulder now for the delay to be a bitter disappointment to them both—even Kojak seemed uneasy and restless.
When the weather cleared, the going was slower than ever; finding the road had developed from a continuing nuisance into a serious problem. The snowmobile got stuck repeatedly and they had to dig it out. And on the second day of the New Year, the freight-train rumble of the avalanches began again.
On the fourth they came to the place where US 6 split off from the turnpike to go its own way to Golden, and although neither of them knew it—there were no dreams or premonitions—that was the day that Frannie Goldsmith went into labor.
“Okay,” Stu said as they paused at the turnoff. “No more trouble finding the road, anyhow. It’s been blasted through solid rock.” Staying on the road was easy enough, but getting through the tunnels was not. To find the entrances they had to dig through powdered snow in some cases and through the packed remains of old avalanches in others. The snowmobile roared and clashed unhappily over the bare road inside.
Worse, it was scary in the tunnels—as either Larry or the Trashcan Man could have told them. They were black as minepits except for the cone of light thrown by the snowmobile’s headlamp, because both ends were packed with snow. Being inside them was like being shut in a dark refrigerator. Going was painfully slow, getting out at the far end of each tunnel was an exercise in engineering, and Stu was very much afraid that they would come upon a tunnel that was simply impassable no matter how much they grunted and heaved.
On January seventh, about two hours after they had dug their way out of another tunnel, Tom stood up on the back of the snowmobile and pointed. “What’s that, Stu?”
Stu was tired and grumpy. The dreams had stopped coming, but, perversely, that was somehow more frightening than having them. “Don’t stand up while we’re moving, how many ti
mes have I told you that? You’ll fall over backward and go head first into the snow and—”
“Yeah, but what is it? It looks like a bridge. Did we get on a river someplace, Stu?”
Stu looked, saw, throttled down, and stopped.
“What is it?” Tom asked anxiously.
“Overpass,” Stu muttered, “I—I just don’t believe it—”
“Overpass? Overpass?”
Stu turned around and grabbed Tom’s shoulders. “It’s the Golden overpass, Tom! That’s 119 up there, Route 119! The Boulder road! Twenty miles! No more!”
Tom understood at last. His mouth fell open, and the comical expression on his face made Stu laugh out loud and clap him on the back. Not even the steady dull ache in his leg could bother him now.
“Are we really almost home, Stu?”
"Yes, yes, yeeessss!”
Then they were grabbing each other, dancing around in a clumsy circle, falling down, sending up puffs of snow, powdering themselves with the stuff. Kojak looked on, amazed ... but after a few moments he joined them.
They camped that night in Golden, and headed north toward Boulder early the next morning. Neither of them had slept very well the night before. Stu had never felt such anticipation in his life . . . and mixed with it was his steady nagging worry about Frannie and the baby.
About an hour after noon, the snowmobile began to hitch and lug. Stu turned it off and got the spare gas can lashed to the side of Kojak’s little cabin. “Oh Christ!” he said, feeling its deadly lightness.
“What’s the matter, Stu?”
“Me, I’m the matter. I knew that friggin can was empty, and I forgot to fill it. Too damn excited, I guess. How’s that for stupid?”
“We’re out of gas?”
Stu flung the empty can away. “We sure-God are. How could I be that stupid?”
“Thinking about Frannie, I guess. What do we do now, Stu?”
“We walk, or try to. You’ll want your sleeping bag. We’ll split this canned stuff, put it in the sleeping bags. We’ll leave the shelters behind. I’m sorry, Tom. My fault all the way.”
“That’s all right, Stu.”
They didn’t get to Boulder that day; instead they camped at dusk, exhausted from wading through the powdery snow which seemed so light but had slowed them to a literal crawl. There was no fire that night. There was no wood handy, and they were all three too exhausted to dig for it. They were surrounded by high, rolling snow-dunes. Even after dark there was no glow on the northern horizon, although Stu looked anxiously for it.
They ate a cold supper and Tom disappeared into his sleeping bag and fell instantly asleep without even saying goodnight. Stu was tired, and his bad leg ached abominably. Be lucky if I haven’t racked it up for good, he thought.
An unsettling thought occurred as he crawled into his sleeping bag. They would get to Boulder and Boulder would be empty—as empty as Grand Junction had been, and Avon, and Kittredge. Empty houses, empty stores, buildings with their roofs crashed in from the weight of the snow. Streets filled in with drifts. No sound but the drip of melting snow in one of the periodic thaws—he had read at the library that it was not unheard-of for the temperature in Boulder to shoot suddenly up to seventy degrees in the heart of winter. But everyone would be gone, like the people in a dream when you wake up. Because no one was left in the world but Stu Redman and Tom Cullen.
It was a crazy thought, but he couldn’t shake it. He crawled out of his sleeping bag and looked north again, hoping for that faint lightening at the horizon that you can see when there is a community of people not too far distant in that direction. Surely he should be able to see something. He tried to remember how many people Glen had guessed would be in the Free Zone by the time the snow closed down travel. He couldn’t pull the figure out. Maybe—
Maybe you ought to get yself some sleep and forget all this nutty stuff. Let tomorrow take care of tomorrow.
He lay down, and after a few more minutes of tossing and turning, brute exhaustion had its way. He slept. And dreamed he was in Boulder, a summertime Boulder where all the lawns were yellow and dead from the heat and lack of water. The only sound was an unlatched door banging back and forth in the light breeze. They had all left. Even Tom was gone.
Frannie! he called, but his only answer was the wind and that sound of the door, banging slowly back and forth.
By two o’clock the next day, they had struggled along another few miles. They took turns breaking trail. Stu was beginning to believe that they would be on the road yet another day. He was the one that was slowing them down. His leg was beginning to seize up. Be crawling pretty soon, he thought. Tom had been doing most of the trail-breaking.
When they paused for their cold canned lunch, it occured to Stu that he had never even seen Frannie when she was really big. Might have that chance yet. But he didn’t think he would. He had become more and more convinced that it had happened without him.
Now, an hour after they had finished lunch, he was still so full of his own thoughts that he almost walked into Tom, who had stopped.
“What’s the problem?” he asked, rubbing his leg.
“The road,” Tom said, and Stu came around to look in a hurry.
After a long, wondering pause, Stu said, “I’ll be dipped in pitch.”
They were standing atop a snowbank nearly nine feet high. Crusted snow sloped steeply down to the bare road below, and to the right was a sign which read simply: BOULDER CITY LIMITS.
Stu began to laugh. He sat down on the snow and roared, his face turned up to the sky, oblivious of Tom’s puzzled look. At last he said, “They plowed the roads. Y’see? We made it, Tom! We made it! Kojak! Come here!”
Stu spread the rest of the Dog Yummies on top of the snowbank and Kojak gobbled them while Stu smoked and Tom looked at the road that had appeared out of the miles of unmarked snow like a lunatic’s mirage.
“We’re in Boulder again,” Tom murmured softly. “We really are. C-I-T-Y-L-I-M-I-T-S, that spells Boulder, laws, yes.”
Stu clapped him on the shoulder and tossed his cigarette away. “Come on, Tommy. Let’s get our bad selves home.”
Around four, it began to snow again. By 6 P.M. it was dark and the black tar of the road had become a ghostly white under their feet.
Stu was limping badly now, almost lurching along. Tom asked him once if he wanted to rest, and Stu only shook his head.
By eight, the snow had become thick and driving. Once or twice they lost their direction and blundered into the snowbanks beside the road before getting themselves reoriented. The going underfoot became slick. Tom fell twice and then, around quarter past eight, Stu fell on his bad leg. He had to clench his teeth against a groan. Tom rushed to help him get up.
“I’m okay,” Stu said, and managed to gain his feet.
It was twenty minutes later when a young, nervous voice quavered out of the dark, freezing them to the spot: “W-Who g-goes there?” Kojak began to growl, his fur bushing up into hackles. Tom gasped. And just audible below the steady shriek of the wind, Stu heard a sound that caused terror to race through him: the snick of a rifle bolt being levered back.
They've posted sentries. Be funny to come all this way and get shot by a sentry outside the Table Mesa Shopping Center.
“Stu Redman!” he yelled into the dark. “It’s Stu Redman here!” He swallowed and heard an audible click in his throat. “Who’s that over there?”
Stupid. Won’t be anyone that you know—
But the voice that drifted out of the snow did sound familiar. “Stu? Stu Redman?”
“Tom Cullen’s with me . . . for Christ’s sake, don’t shoot us!”
“Is it a trick?” The voice seemed to be deliberating with itself.
“No trick! Tom, say something.”
“Hi there,” Tom said obediently.
There was a pause. The snow blew and shrieked around them. Then the sentry (yes, that voice was familiar) called: “Stu had a picture on the wall in the old a
partment. What was it?”
Stu racked his brain frantically. The sound of that drawn rifle bolt kept recurring, getting in the way. He thought, My God, I’m standing here in a blizzard trying to think, what picture was on the wall in the apartment—the old apartment, he said, Fran must have moved in with Lucy. Lucy used to make fun of that picture, used to say that John Wayne was waiting for those Indians just where you couldn’t see him—
“Frederic Remington!” He bellowed at the top of his lungs. “It’s called ‘The Warpath’!”
“Stu!” the sentry yelled back. A black shape materialized out of the snow, slipping and sliding as it ran toward them. “I just can’t believe it—”
Then he was in front of them, and Stu saw it was Billy Gehringer, who had caused them so much trouble with his hot-rodding late last summer.
“Stu! Tom! And Kojak, by Christ! Where’s Glen Bateman and Larry? Where’s Ralph?”
Stu shook his head slowly. "‘Don’t know. We got to get out of the cold, Billy. We’re freezing.”
“Sure, the supermarket’s right up the road. I’ll call Norm Kellogg . . . Harry Dunbarton . . . Dick Ellis . . . shit, I’ll wake the town! This is great!”
“Billy—” Stu gripped his shoulder as Billy Gehringer turned. “Billy, Fran was going to have a baby—”
Billy grew very still. And then he whispered, “Oh shit, I forgot about that.”
“She’s had it?”
“George. George Richardson can tell you, Stu. Or Dan Lathrop. He’s our new doc, we got him about four weeks after you guys left, used to be a nose, throat, and ears man, but he’s pretty g—”
Stu gave Billy a brisk shake, cutting off his almost frantic babble. “What’s wrong?” Tom asked. “Is something wrong with Frannie?” “Talk to me, Billy,” Stu said. “Please.”
“Fran’s okay,” Billy said. “She’s going to be fine.”
“That what you heard?”
“No, I saw her. Me and Tony Donahue, we went up together with some flowers from the greenhouse. The greenhouse is Tony’s project, he’s got all kinds of stuff growing there, not just flowers. The only reason she’s still in is because she had to have a what-do-you-call-it, a Roman birth—”