by Stephen King
“A caesarean section?”
“Yeah, right, because the baby came the wrong way. But no sweat. We went to see her three days after she had the baby, it was January seventh we went up, two days ago. We brought her some roses. We figured she could use some cheering up because . .
“The baby died?” Stu asked dully.
“It’s not dead,” Billy said, and then he added with great reluctance: “Not yet.”
Stu suddenly felt far away, rushing through the void. He heard laughter . . . and the howling of wolves . . .
Billy said in a miserable rush: “It’s got the flu, Captain Trips. It’s the end for all of us, that’s what people are saying. Frannie had him on the fourth, a boy, six pounds nine ounces, and at first he was okay and I guess everybody in the Zone got drunk, Dick Ellis said it was like V-E Day and V-J Day all rolled into one, and then on the sixth, he ... he just got it. Yeah, man,” Billy said, and his voice began to hitch and thicken. “He got it, oh shit, ain’t that some welcome home, I’m so fuckin sorry, Stu . . .”
Stu reached out, found Billy’s shoulders, and pulled him closer.
“At first everybody was sayin hey, maybe it’s just the ordinary flu ... or bronchitis . . . maybe the croup . . . but the docs, they said newborn babies almost never get those things. It’s like a natural immunity, because they’re so little. And both George and Dan . . . they saw so much of the superflu last year . . .”
“That it would be hard for them to make a mistake,” Stu finished for him.
“Yeah,” Billy whispered. “You got it.”
“What a bitch,” Stu muttered. He turned away from Billy and began to limp down the road again.
“Stu, where are you going?”
“To the hospital,” Stu said. “To see my woman.”
Chapter 66
Fran lay awake with the reading lamp on. It cast a pool of bright light on the left side of the clean white sheet that covered her. In the center of the light, face down, was an Agatha Christie. She was awake but slowly drifting off, in that state where memories clarify magically as they begin to transmute themselves into dreams. She was going to bury her father. What happened after that didn’t matter, but she was going to drag herself out of the shockwave enough to get that done. That act of love.
Marcy had been in half an hour ago to check on her, and Fran had asked, “Is he dead yet?” And even as she spoke time seemed to double so that she wasn’t sure if she meant Peter the baby or Peter the baby’s grandfather, now deceased.
“Shhhh, he’s fine,” Marcy had said, but Frannie had seen a more truthful answer in Marcy’s eyes. The baby she had made with Jess Rider was engaged in dying somewhere behind four glass walls. Perhaps Lucy’s baby would have better luck; both of its parents had been immune to Captain Trips. The Zone had written off her Peter now and had pinned its collective hope on those women who had conceived after July 1 of last year. It was brutal but completely understandable.
Her mind drifted, cruising at some low level along the border of sleep, conning the landscape of her past and the terrain of her heart. She thought about her mother’s parlor where seasons passed in a dry age. She thought about Stu’s eyes, about the first sight of her baby, Peter Goldsmith-Redman. She dreamed that Stu was with her, in her room.
“Fran?”
Nothing had worked out the way it should have. All of the hopes had turned out to be phony, as false as those Audioanimatronic animals at Disney World, just a bunch of clockwork, a cheat, a false dawn, a false pregnancy, a—
“Hey, Frannie.”
In her dream she saw that Stu had come back. He was standing in the doorway of her room, wearing a gigantic fur parka. Another cheat. But she saw that the dream-Stu had a beard. Wasn’t that funny?
She began to wonder if it was a dream when she saw Tom Cullen standing behind him. And . . . was that Kojak sitting at Stu’s heel?
Her hand flew suddenly up to her cheek and pinched viciously, making her left eye water. Nothing changed.
“Stu?” she whispered. “Oh my God, is it Stu?”
His face was deeply tanned except for the skin around his eyes, which might have been covered by sunglasses. That was not a detail you would expect to notice in a dream—
She pinched herself again.
“It’s me,” Stu said, coming into the room. His limp was so severe he was nearly stumbling. “Frannie, I’m home.”
"‘Stu!” she cried. “Are you real? If you’re real, come here!”
He went to her then, and held her.
Chapter 67
Stu was sitting in a chair drawn up to Fran’s bed when George Richardson and Dan Lathrop came in. Fran immediately seized Stu’s hand and squeezed it tightly, almost painfully. Her face was set in rigid lines, and for a moment Stu saw what she would look like when she was old; for a moment she looked like Mother Abagail.
“Stu,” George said. “I heard about your return. Miraculous. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you. We all are.”
George shook his hand and then introduced Dan Lathrop.
Dan said, “We’ve heard there was an explosion in Las Vegas. You actually saw it?”
“Yes.”
George nodded at this, then seemed to dismiss it and turned to Fran.
“How are you feeling?”
“All right. Glad to have my man back. What about that baby?”
“Actually,” Lathrop said, “that’s what we’re here about.”
Fran nodded. “Dead?”
George and Dan exchanged a glance. “Frannie, I want you to listen carefully and try not to misunderstand anything I say—”
Lightly, with suppressed hysteria, Fran said: “If he’s dead, just tell me!”
“Fran,” Stu said.
“Peter seems to be recovering,” Dan Lathrop said mildly.
There was a moment of utter silence in the room. Fran, her face pale and oval below the dark chestnut mass of her hair on the pillow, looked up at Dan as if he had suddenly begun to spout some sort of lunatic doggerel. Someone—either Laurie Constable or Marcy
Spruce—looked into the room and then passed on. It was a moment that Stu never forgot.
“What?” Fran whispered at last.
George said, “You mustn’t get your hopes up.”
“You said . . . recovering,” Fran said. Her face was flatly stunned. Until this moment she hadn’t realized how much she had resigned herself to the baby’s death.
George said, “Both Dan and I saw thousands of cases during the epidemic, Fran . . . you notice I don’t say ‘treated’ because I don’t think either of us ever changed the course of the disease by a jot or a tittle in any patient. Fair statement, Dan?”
“Yes.”
The I-want line that Stu had first noticed in New Hampshire hours after meeting her now appeared on Fran’s forehead. “Will you get to the point, for heaven’s sake?”
“I’m trying, but I’m going to be careful,” George said. “This is your son’s life we’re discussing, and I’m not going to let you press me. I want you to understand the drift of our thinking. Captain Trips was a shifting-antigen flu, we think now. Now, every kind of flu—the old flu—had a different antigen; that’s why it kept coming back every two or three years or so in spite of flu vaccinations. There would be an outbreak of A-type flu, Hong Kong flu that was, and you’d get a vaccination for it, and then two years later a B-type strain would come along and you’d get sick unless you got a different vaccination.”
“But you’d get well again,” Dan broke in, “because eventually your body would produce its own antibodies. Your body changed to cope with the flu. With Captain Trips, the flu itself changed every time your body came to a defense posture. And it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death.”
“Then why didn’t we get it?” Stu asked.
George said: “We don’t know. I don’t think we’re ever going to know. The only thing we can be sure about
is that the immunes didn’t get sick and then throw the sickness off; they never got sick at all. Which brings us to Peter again. Dan?”
“Yes. The key to Captain Trips is that people seemed to get almost better, but never completely better. Now this baby, Peter, got sick forty-eight hours after he was born. There was no doubt at all that it was Captain Trips—the symptoms were classic. But those discolorations under the line of the jaw, which both George and I had come to associate with the fourth and terminal stage of the superflu —they never came. On the other hand, his periods of remission have been getting longer and longer.”
“I don’t understand,” Fran said, bewildered. “What—”
“Every time the flu shifts, Peter is shifting right back at it,” George said. “There’s still the technical possibility that he might relapse, but ... he seems to be wearing it out.”
There was a moment of total silence.
Dan said, “You’ve passed on half an immunity to your child, Fran. He got it, but we think now he’s got the ability to lick it. We theorize that Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had the same chance, but with the odds stacked much more radically against them—and I still think that they may not have died of the superflu, but of complications arising from the superflu. That’s a very small distinction, I know, but it may be crucial.”
“And the other women who got pregnant by men who weren’t immune?” Stu asked.
“We think they’ll have to watch their babies go through the same painful struggle,” George said, “and some of the children may die— it was touch and go with Peter for a while, and may be again from all we know now. But very shortly we’re going to reach the point where all the fetuses in the Free Zone—in the world—are the product of two immune parents. And while it wouldn’t be fair to pre-guess, I’d be willing to lay money that when that happens, it’s going to be our ballgame. In the meantime, we’re going to be watching Peter very closely.”
“And we won’t be watching him alone, if that’s any added consolation,” Dan added. “In a very real sense, Peter belongs to the entire Free Zone right now.”
Fran whispered, “I only want him to live because he’s mine and I love him.” She looked at Stu. “And he’s my link with the old world. He looks more like Jess than me, and I’m glad. That seems right. Do you understand, Stu?”
Stu nodded, and a strange thought occurred to him—how much he would like to sit down with Hap and Norm Bruett and Vic Palfrey and have a beer with them and watch Vic make one of his shittysmelling home-rolled cigarettes, and tell them how all of this had come out. They had always called him Silent Stu; ole Stu, they said, wouldn’t say “shit” if he had a mouthful. But he would talk their ears off their heads. He would talk all night and all day. He grasped Fran’s hand blindly, feeling the sting of tears.
“We’ve got rounds to make,” George said, getting up, “but we’ll be monitoring Peter closely, Fran. You’ll know for sure when we know for sure.”
“When could I nurse him? If . . . If he doesn’t. . . ?”
“A week,” Dan said.
“But that’s so long!”
“It’s going to be long for all of us. We’ve got sixty-one pregnant women in the Zone, and nine of them conceived before the superflu. It’s going to be especially long for them. Stu? It was good meeting you.” Dan held out his hand and Stu shook it. He left quickly, a man with a necessary job to do and anxious to do it.
George shook Stu’s hand and said, “I’ll see you by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, hum? Just tell Laurie when would be the most convenient time for you."
“What for?”
“The leg,” George said. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Not too bad.”
“Stu?” Frannie said, sitting up. “What’s wrong with your leg?” “Broken, badly set, overtaxed,” George said. “Nasty. But it can be fixed.”
“Well. . ” Stu said.
“Well, nothing! Let me see it, Stuart!” The I-want line was back. “Later,” Stu said.
George got up. “See Laurie, all right?”
“He will,” Frannie said.
Stu grinned. “I will. Boss lady says so.”
“It’s very good to have you back,” George said. A thousand questions seemed to stop just behind his lips. He shook his head slightly and then left, closing the door firmly behind him.
“Let me see you walk,” Frannie said. The I-want line still creased her brow.
“Hey, Frannie—”
“Come on, let me see you walk.”
He walked for her. It was a little like watching a sailor make his way across a pitching foredeck. When he turned back to her, she was crying.
“Oh, Frannie, don’t do that, honey.”
“I have to,” she said, and put her hands over her face.
He sat beside her and took her hands away. “No. No, you don’t.” She looked at him nakedly, her tears still flowing. “So many people dead . . . Harold, Nick, Susan . . . and what about Larry? What about Glen and Ralph?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what’s Lucy going to say? She’ll be here in an hour. She comes every day, and she’s six months pregnant herself. Stu, when she asks you . . .”
“They died over there,” Stu said, speaking more to himself than to her. “That’s what I think. What I know, in my heart.”
“Don’t say it that way,” Fran begged. “Not when Lucy gets here. It will break her heart if you do.”
“I think they were the sacrifice. God always asks for a sacrifice. His hands are bloody with it. Why? I can’t say. I’m not a very smart man. Praps we brought it on ourselves. All I know for sure is that the bomb went off over there instead of over here and we’re safe for a while. For a little while.”
“Is Flagg gone? Really gone?”
“I don’t know. I think . . . we’ll have to stand a watch for him. And in time, someone will have to find the place where they made the germs like Captain Trips and fill that place up with dirt and seed the ground with salt and then pray over it. Pray for all of us.”
Much later that evening, not long before midnight, Stu pushed her down the silent hospital corridor in a wheelchair. Laurie Constable walked with them, and Fran had seen to it that Stu had made his appointment.
“You look like you’re the one that should be in that wheelchair, Stu Redman,” Laurie said.
“Right now it doesn’t bother me at all,” Stu said.
They came to a large glass window that looked in on a room done in blues and pinks. A large mobile hung from the ceiling. Only one crib was occupied, in the front row.
Stu stared in, fascinated.
GOLDSMITH-REDMAN, PETER, the card at the foot of the crib read. BOY. B.W. 6 LB. 9 OZ. M. FRANCES GOLDSMITH, RM. 209 F. JESSIE RIDER (D.)
Peter was crying.
His small hands were balled into fists. His face was red. There was an amazing swatch of dark black hair on his head. His eyes were blue and they seemed to look directly into Stu’s eyes, as if accusing him of being the author of all his misery.
His forehead was creased with a deep vertical slash ... an I-want line.
Frannie was crying again.
“Frannie, what’s wrong?”
“All those empty cribs,” she said, and her voice became a sob. “That’s what’s wrong. He’s all alone in there. No wonder he’s crying, Stu, he’s all alone in there. All those empty cribs, my God—”
“He won’t be alone for so very long,” Stu said, and put an arm around her shoulders. “And he looks to me as if he’s going to bear up just fine. Don’t you think so, Laurie?”
But Laurie had left the two of them alone in front of the nursery window.
Wincing at the pain in his leg, Stu knelt beside Frannie and hugged her clumsily, and they looked in at Peter in mutual wonder, as if the child were the first that had ever been gotten upon the earth. After a bit Peter fell asleep, small hands clenched together on his chest, and still they watched him . . . and wondered that he shoul
d be there at all.
Chapter 68
Mayday
They had finally put the winter behind them.
It had been long, and to Stu, with his East Texas background, it had seemed fantastically hard. Two days after his return to Boulder, his right leg had been rebroken and reset and this time encased in a heavy plaster cast that had not come off until early April. By then the cast had begun to look like some incredibly complex roadmap; it seemed that everyone in the Zone had autographed it, although that was a patent impossibility. The pilgrims had begun to trickle in again by the first of March, and by the day that had been the cut-off for income tax returns in the old world, the Free Zone was nearly eleven thousand strong, according to Sandy DuChiens, who now headed a Census Bureau of a dozen persons, a bureau that had its own computer terminal at the First Bank of Boulder.
Now he and Fran stood with Luey Swann in the picnic area halfway up Flagstaff Mountain and watched the Mayday Chase. All of the Zone’s children appeared to be involved (and not a few of the adults). The original maybasket, bedecked with crepe ribbons and filled with fruit and toys, had been hung on Tom Cullen. It had been Fran’s idea.
Tom had caught Bill Gehringer (despite Billy’s self-conscious disclaimer that he was too old for such kid games, he had joined in with a will), and together they had caught the Upshaw boy—or was it Upson? Stu had trouble keeping them all straight—and the three of them had tracked down Leo Rockway hiding behind Brentner Rock. Tom himself had put the tag on Leo.
The chase ranged back and forth over West Boulder, gangs of kids and adolescents surging up and down the streets that were still mostly empty, Tom bellowing and carrying his basket. And at last it had led back up here, where the sun was hot and the wind blew warm. The band of tagged children was some two hundred strong, and they were still in the process of tracking down the last half a dozen or so that were still “out.” In the process they were scaring up dozens of deer that wanted no part of the game.
Two miles further up, at Sunrise Amphitheater, a huge picnic lunch had been spread where Harold Lauder had once waited for just the right moment to speak into his walkie-talkie. At noon, two or three thousand people would sit down together and look east toward Denver and eat venison and deviled eggs and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and fresh pie for dessert. It might be the last mass gathering the Zone would ever have, unless they all went down to Denver and got together in the stadium where the Broncos had once played football. Now, on Mayday, the trickle of early spring had swelled to a flood of immigrants. Since April 15 another eight thousand had come in, and they were now nineteen thousand or so —temporarily at least, Sandy’s Census Bureau could not keep up. A day when only five hundred came in was a rare day.