CHAPTER 50 Dawn was coming up, painting the eastern sky a delicate rose color. Stu Redman and Glen

CHAPTER 50

Dawn was coming up, painting the eastern sky a delicate rose color. Stu Redman and Glen Bateman were about halfway up Flagstaff Mountain in West Boulder, where the first foothills of the Rockies rise up out of the flat plains like a vision of prehistory. In the dawnlight Stu thought that the pines crawling between the naked and nearly perpendicular stone faces looked like the veins ridging some giant's hand that had poked out of the earth. Somewhere to the east, Nadine Cross was at last falling into a thin, unsatisfactory sleep. "I'm going to have a headache this afternoon," Glen said. "I don't believe I've stayed up drinking all night since I was an undergrad." "Sunrise is worth it," Stu said. "Yes, it is. Beautiful. Have you ever been in the Rockies before?" Nope," Stu said. "But I'm glad I came." He hoisted the jug of wine and had a swallow. "I got quite a buzz on myself." He looked out over the view in silence for a few moments and then turned to Glen with a slanted smile. "What's going to happen now?"

300 "Happen?" Glen raised his eyebrows. "Sure. That's why I got you up here. Told Frannie, `I'm gonna get him good n drunk and then pick his brains. ' She said fine." Glen grinned. "There are no tea leaves in the bottom of a wine bottle." "No, but she explained to me just what it is you used to be. Sociology. The study of group interaction. So make some educated guesses." "Cross my palm with silver, O aspirant to knowledge." "Never mind the silver, baldy. I'll take you down to the First National Bank of Boulder tomorrow and give you a million dollars. How's that?" "Seriously, Stu-what do you want to know?" "Same things that mute guy Andros wants to know, I guess. What's going to happen next. I don't know how to put it any better than that." "There's going to be a society," Glen said slowly. "What kind? Impossible to say right now. There are almost four hundred people here now. I'd guess from the rate they've been coming in-more every day-that by the first of September there'll be fifteen hundred of us. Forty-five hundred by the first of October, and maybe as many as eight thousand by the time the snow flies in November and closes the roads. Write that down as prediction number one." To Glen's amusement, Stu did indeed produce a notebook from the back pocket of his jeans and jotted down what he had just said. "Hard for me to believe," Stu said. "We came all the way across the country and didn't see a hundred people all told." "Yes, but they're coming in, aren't they?" "Yes... in dribs and drabs." "In what and whats?" Glen asked, grinning. "Dribs and drabs. My mother used to say that. You shitting on my mom's way of talking?" The day will never come in when I lose enough respect for my own hide to shit on a Texan's mother, Stuart." "Well, they're comin in, sure. Ralph's in touch with five or six groups right now that will bring us up to five hundred by the end of the week." Glen smiled again. "Yes, and Mother Abagail sits right there with him in his `radio station,' but she won't talk on the CB. Says she's afraid she'll get an electroshock." "Frannie loves that old woman," Stu said. "Part of it is because she knows so much about delivering babies, but part of it is just... loving her. You know?" "Yes. Most everybody feels the same." "Eight thousand people by winter," Stu said, returning to the original topic. "Man oh man." "It's just arithmetic. Let's say the flu wiped out ninetynine percent of the population. Maybe it wasn't that bad, but let's use that figure just so we have a place to put our feet. If the flu was ninety-nine percent fatal, that means it wiped out damned near two hundred and eighteen million people, just in this country." He looked at Stu's shocked face and nodded grimly. "Maybe it wasn't that bad, but we can make a pretty good guess that figure's in the ballpark. Makes the Nazis look like pikers, doesn't it?" "My Lord," Stu said in a dry voice. "But that would still leave over two million people, a fifth of the pre-plague population of Tokyo, a fourth of the pre-plague population of New York. That's in this country alone. Now, I believe that ten percent of that two million might not have survived the aftermath of the flu. Folks who fell victims to what I'd call the—aftershock. People like poor Mark Braddock with his burst appendix, but also the accidents, the suicides, yes, and murder, too. That takes us down to 1. 8 million. But we suspect there's an Adversary, don't we? The dark man that we dreamed about. West of us somewhere. There are seven states over there that could legitimately be called his territory... if he really exists." "I guess he exists, all right," Stu said. "My feeling, too. But is he simply in dominion of all the people over there? I don't think so, any more than Mother Abagail is automatically in dominion over the people in the other forty-one continental United States. I think things have been in a state of slow flux and that that state of affairs is beginning to end. People are cohering. When you and I first discussed this back in New Hampshire, I envisioned dozens of little tinpot societies. What I didn't count onbecause I didn't know about it was the all but irresistible pull of these two opposing dreams. It was a new fact that no one could have foreseen." "Are you saying that we'll end up with nine hundred thousand people and he'll end up with nine hundred thousand?" "No. First, the coming winter is going to take its toll. It's going to take it here, and it's going to be even tougher for the small groups that don't make it here before the snow. You realize we don't even have one doctor in the Free Zone yet? Our medical staff consists of a veterinarian and Mother Abagail herself, who's forgotten more valid folk medicine than you or I will ever have a chance to

301 learn. Still, they'd look cute trying to put a steel plate in your skull after you took a fall and bashed in the back of your head, wouldn't they?" Stu snickered. "That ole boy Rolf Dannemont would probably drag out his Remington and let daylight through me." "I'd guess the total American population might be down to 1. 6 million by next spring-and that's a kind estimate. Of that number, I'd like to hope we'd get the million." "A million people," Stu said, awed. He looked out over the sprawling, mostly deserted city of Boulder, now brightening as the sun began to hoist itself over the flat eastern horizon. "I just can't picture that. This town would be busting at the seams." "Boulder couldn't hold them. I know that boggles the mind when you walk around the empty streets downtown and out toward Table Mesa, but it just couldn't. We'd have to seed the communities around us. The situation you'd have is this one giant community and the rest of the country east of here absolutely empty." "Why do you think we'd get most of the people?" "For a very unscientific reason," Glen said, riffling his tonsure of hair with one hand. "I like to believe most people are good, And I believe that whoever is running the show west of us is really bad. But I have a hunch..." He trailed off. "Go on, spill it." "I will because I'm drunk. But it stays between us, Stuart." "All right." "Your word?" "My word," Stu said. "I think he's going to get most of the techies," Glen said finally. "Don't ask me why; it's just a hunch. Except that tech people like to work in an atmosphere of tight discipline and linear goals, for the most part. They like it when the trains run on time. What we've got here in Boulder right now is mass confusion, everyone bopping along and doing his own thing... and we've got to do something about what my students would have called `getting our shit together. ' But that other fellow... I'll bet he's got the trains running on time and all his ducks in a row. And techies are just as human as the rest of us; they'll go where they're wanted the most. I've a suspicion that our Adversary wants as many as he can get. Fuck the farmers, he'd just as soon have a few men who can dust off those Idaho missile silos and get them operational again. Ditto tanks and helicopters and maybe a B-52 bomber or two just for chuckles. I doubt if he's gotten that far yet-in fact, I'm sure of it. We'd know. Right now he's probably still concentrating on getting the power back on, re-establishing communications... maybe he's even had to indulge in a purge of the fainthearted. Rome wasn't built in a day, and he'll know that. He has time. But when I watch the sun go down at night-this is no shit, Stuart-I get scared. I don't need bad dreams to scare me anymore. All I have to do is think of them over there on the other side of the Rockies, busy as little bees." "What should we be doing?" "Should I give you a list?" Glen responded, grinning. Stuart gestured at his battered notebook. There were two dancers in silhouette and the words BOOGIE DOWN! on its hot pink cover. "Yup," he said. "You're kidding." "No, I ain't. You said it, Glen, we got to start getting our shit together someplace. I feel it, too. It's getting later every day. We can't just sit here jacking off and listening to the CB. We may wake up some morning to find that hardcase waltzing into Boulder at the head of an armored column, complete with air support." "Don't look for him tomorrow," Glen said. "No. But what about next May?" "Possible," Glen said in a low voice. "Yes, quite possible." "And what do you think would happen to us?" Glen didn't reply with words. He made an explicit little trigger-pulling gesture with the forefinger of his right hand and then hurriedly scoffed the last of the wine. "Yeah," Stu said. "So let's start getting it together. Talk." Glen closed his eyes. The brightening day touched his wrinkled cheeks and forehead. "Okay," he said. "Here it is, Stu. First: Re-create America. Little America. By fair means and by foul. Organization and government come first. If it starts now, we can. form the sort of government we want. If we wait until the population triples, we are going to have grave problems. "Let's say we call a meeting a week from today, that would make it August eighteenth. Everyone to attend. Before the meeting there should be an ad hoc Organization Committee. A committee of seven, let us say. You, me, Andros, Fran, Harold Lauder, maybe, a couple more. The job of the committee would be to create an agenda for the August eighteenth meeting. And I can tell you right now what some of the items on that agenda should be." "Shoot."

302 "First, reading and ratification of the Declaration of Independence. Second, r and r of the Constitution. Third, r and r of the Bill of Rights. All ratification to be done by voice vote." "Christ, Glen, we're all Americans—" "No, that's where you're wrong," Glen said, opening his eyes. They looked socketed and bloodshot. "We're a bunch of survivors with no-government at all. We're a hodgepodge collection from every age group, religious group, class group, and racial group. Government is an idea, Stu. That's really all it is, once you strip away the bureaucracy and the bullshit. I'll go further. It's an inculcation, nothing but a memory path worn through the brain. What we've got going for us now is culture lag. Most of these people still believe in government by representation—the Republic-what they think of as `democracy. ' But culture lag never lasts long. After a while they'll start having the gut reactions: the President is dead, the Pentagon is for rent, nobody is debating anything in the House and the Senate except maybe for the termites and the cockroaches. Our people here are very soon going to wake up to the fact that the old ways are gone, and that they can restructure society any old way they want. We want-we need-to catch them before they wake up and do something nutty. He leveled his finger at Stu. "If someone stood up at the August eighteenth meeting and proposed that Mother Abagail be put in absolute charge, with you and me and that fellow Andros as her advisers, those people would pass the item by acclamation, blissfully unaware that they had just voted the first operating American dictatorship into power since Huey Long." "Oh, I cant believe that. There are college graduates here, lawyers, political activists—" "Maybe they used to be. Now they're just a bunch of tired, scared people who don't know what's going to happen to them. Some might squawk, but they'd shut up when you told them that Mother Abagail and her advisers were going to get the power back on in sixty days. No, Stu, it's very important that the first thing we do is ratify the spirit of the old society. That's what I meant about recreating America. It has to be that way as long as we're operating under direct threat of the man we're calling the Adversary." "Go on." "All right. The next item on the agenda would be that we run the government like a New England township. Perfect democracy. As long as we're relatively small, it'll work fine. Only instead of a board of selectmen we'll have seven... representatives, I guess. Free Zone Representatives. How does that sound?" "It sounds fine." "I think so, too. And we'll see to it that the people who get elected are the same people who were on the ad hoc committee. We'll put the rush on everybody and get the vote taken before people can do any tub-thumping for their friends. We can handpick people to nominate us and then second us. The vote'll go through as slick as shit through a goose." "That's neat," Stu said admiringly. "Sure," Glen said glumly. "If you want to short-circuit the democratic process, ask a sociologist." "What's next?" "This is going to be very popular. The item would read: `Resolved: Mother Abagail is to be given absolute veto power over any action proposed by the Board. '" "Jesus! Will she agree to that?" "I think so. But I don't think she'd ever be apt to exercise her veto power, not in any circumstance I can foresee. We just can't expect to have a workable government here unless we make her its titular head. She's the thing we all have in common. We've all had a paranormal experience that revolves around her. And she has a... a kind of aura about her. People all use the same loose bunch of adjectives to describe her: good, kind, old, wise, clever, nice. These people have had one dream that frightens the bejesus out of them and one that makes them feel safe and secure. They love and trust the source of the good dream all the more because of the dream that frightened them. And we can make it clear to her that she's our leader in name only. I think that's how she'd want it. She's old, tired..." Stu was shaking his head. "She's old and tired, but she sees this problem of the dark man as a religious crusade, Glen. And she's not the only one, either. You know that." "You mean she might decide to take the bit in her teeth?" "Maybe that wouldn't be so bad," Stu remarked. "After all, it was her we dreamed of, not a Representative Board." Glen was shaking his head. "No, I can't accept the idea that we're all pawns in some post- Apocalypse game of good and evil, dreams or not. Goddammit, it's irrational!" Stu shrugged. "Well, let's not get bogged down in it now. I think your idea of giving her veto power is a good one. In fact, I don't think it goes far enough. We ought to give her the power to propose as well as dispose." "But not absolute power on that side of the slate," Glen said hastily.

303 "No, her ideas would have to be ratified by the Representative Board," Stu said, and then added slyly: "But we might find ourselves a rubber stamp for her instead of the other way around." There was a long silence. Glen had put his forehead into one hand. At last he said, "Yeah, you're right. She can't just be a figurehead... at the very least we have to accept the possibility that she may have her own ideas. And that's where I pack up my cloudy crystal ball, East Texas. Because she's what those of us who ride the sociology range call other-directed." "Who's the other?" "God? 'nor? Allah? Pee-wee Herman? It doesn't matter. What it means is that what she says won't necessarily be directed by what this society needs or by what its mores turn out to be. She'll be listening to some other voice. Like Joan of Arc. What you've made me see is that we just might wind up with a theocracy on our hands here." "Theoc-what?" "On a God trip," Glen said. He didn't sound too happy about it. "When you were a little boy, Stu, did you ever dream that you might grow up to be one of seven high priests and/or priestesses to a one-hundred-and-eight-year-old black woman from Nebraska?" Stu stared at him. Finally he said: "Is there any more of that wine?" "All gone." "Shit." "Yes," Glen said. They studied each other's face in silence and then suddenly burst out laughing.

It was surely the nicest house Mother Abagail had ever lived in, and sitting here on the screened- in porch put her in mind of a traveling salesman who had come around Hemingford back in 1936 or '37. Why, he had been the sweetesttalking fellow she had ever met in her life; he could have charmed the birdies right down from the trees. She had asked this young man, Mr. Donald King by name, what his business was with Abby Freemantle, and he had replied: "My business, ma'am, is pleasure. Your pleasure. Do you like to read? Listen to the radio, perchance? Or maybe just put your tired old dogs up on a foot hassock and listen to the world as it rolls down the great bowling alley of the universe?" She had admitted she enjoyed all those things, not admitting that the Motorola had been sold a month before to pay for ninety bales of hay. "Well, those are the things I'm selling," this sweet-talking road-merchant had told her. "It may be called an Electrolux vacuum cleaner complete with all the attachments, but what it really is, is spare time. Plug her in and you open up whole new vistas of relaxation for yourself. And the payments are almost as easy as your housework's going to be." They had been deep in the Depression then, she hadn't even been able to raise twenty cents for hair ribbons for her granddaughters' birthdays, and there was no chance for that Electrolux. But say, didn't that Mr. Donald King of Peru, Indiana, talk sweet. My! She had never seen him again, but She had never forgotten his name, either. She just bet he had gone on to break some white lady's heart. She never did Own a vacuum cleaner until the end of the Nazi war, when it seemed like all of a sudden anybody could afford anything and even poor white trash had a Mercury hidden away in their. back shed. Now this house, which Nick had told her was in the Mapleton Hill section of Boulder (Mother Abagail just bet there hadn't been many blacks living up here before the smiting plague), had every gadget she'd ever heard of and some she hadn't. Dishwasher. Two vacuums, one strictly for the upstairs work. Dispos-All in the sink. Microwave oven. Clothes washer and dryer. There was a gadget in the kitchen, eked like nothing more than a steel box, and Nick's good friend Ralph Bremner told her it was a "trash masher," and you could put about a hundred pounds of swill into it and get back a little block of garbage about the size of a footstool. Wonders never ceased. But come to think of it, some of them had. Sitting, rocking on the porch, her eye happened to fall upon an electrical plug-in plate set into the baseboard. Probably so folks could come out here in the summertime and listen to the radio or even have the baseball on that cute little round TV. Nothing in the whole country more common than those little wall-plates with the prong-slits in them. She'd even had them back in her squatter's shack in Hemingford. You didn't think nothing of those plates... unless they didn't work anymore. Then you realized that one hell of a lot of a person's life came out of them. All that spare time, that pleasure which the long-ago Don King had extolled her on... it came out of those switchplates set into the wall. With their potency taken away, you might as well use all those gadgets like the microwave oven and the "trash masher" to hang your hat and coat on. Say! Her own little house had been better equipped to handle the death of those little switchplates than this one was. Here, someone had to bring her water fetched all the way from Boulder Creek, and it had to be boiled before you could use it, just for safety's sake. Back home she'd had her own handpump. Here, Nick and Ralph had had to truck up an ugly gadget called a Port-O-San; they had put it in the back yard. At home she'd had her own outhouse. She would have

304 traded the Maytag washer-dryer combination in a second for her own washtub, but she had gotten Nick to find her a new one, and Brad Kitchner had found her a scrubboard somewhere and some good old lye soap. They probably thought she was a good old pain in the ass, wanting to do her own washing-and so much of it-but cleanly went next to Godly, she had never sent her washing out in her whole life, and she didn't mean to start now. She had her little accidents from time to time, too, as old folks often did, but as long as she could do her own wash, those accidents didn't have to be anybody's business but her own. They would get the power back on, of course. It was one of the things God had shown her in her dreams. She knew a goodish number of things about what was to come heresome from the dreams, some from her own common sense. The two were too intertwined to tell apart. Soon all these people would stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off and start pulling together. She was not a sociologist like that Glen Bateman (who always eyed her like a racetrack agent looking at a phony ten), but she knew that people always did pull together after a while. The curse and blessing of the human race was its chumminess. Why, if six people went floating down the Mississippi on a church roof in a flood, they'd start a bingo game as soon as the roof grounded on a sandbar. First they'd want to form some sort of government, probably one they'd want to run around her. She couldn't allow that, of course, as much as she would like to; that would not be God's will. Let them run all the things that had to do with this earth-get the power back on? Fine. First thing she was going to do was try out that "trash masher." Get the gas running so they wouldn't freeze their bee-hinds off this winter. Let them pass their resolutions and make their plans, that was fine. She would keep her nose right out of that part. She would insist that Nick have a part in the running of it, and maybe Ralph. That Texan seemed all right, he knew enough to shut off his mouth when his brains weren't running. She supposed they might want that fat boy, that Harold, and she wouldn't stop them, but she didn't like him. Harold made her nervous. All the time grinning, but the grin never touched his eyes. He was pleasant, he said the right things, but his eyes were like two cold flints poking out of the ground. She thought that Harold had some kind of secret. Some smelly, nasty thing all wrapped up in a stinking poultice in the middle of his heart. She had no idea what it might be; it was not God's will for her to see that, so it must not matter to His plan for this community. All the same, it troubled her to think that fat boy might be a part of their high councils... but she would say nothing. Her business she thought rather complacently in her rocker, her place in their councils and deliberations had only to do with the dark man. He had no name, although it pleased him to call himself Flagg... at least for the time being. And on the far side of the mountains, his work was already well begun. She did not know his plans; they were as veiled from her eyes as whatever secrets lay in that fat boy Harold's heart. But she did not have to know the specifics. His goal was clear and simple: to destroy all of them. Her understanding of him was surprisingly sophisticated. The people who had been drawn to the Free Zone all came to see her in this place, and she received them, although they sometimes made her tired... and they all wanted to tell her that they had dreamed of her and of him. They were terrified of him, and she nodded and comforted and soothed as best she could, but privately she thought that most of them wouldn't know this Flagg if they met him on the street... unless he wanted to be noticed. They might feel him-a cold chill, the kind you got when a goose walked over your grave, a sudden hot feeling like a feverflash, or a sharp and momentary drilling pain in the ears or the temples. But these people were wrong to think he had two heads, or six eyes, or big spike horns growing out of his temples. He probably didn't look much different than the man who used to bring the milk or the mail. She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth's children of darkness; they couldn't make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God's light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted-was ableonly to unshape. AntiChrist? You might as well say anticreation. He would have his followers, of course; that was nothing new. He was a liar, and his father was the Father of Lies. He would be like a big neon sign to them, standing high to the sky, dazzling their sight with fizzing fireworks. They would not be apt to notice, these apprentice unshapers, that like a neon sign, he only made the same simple patterns over and over again. They would not be apt to realize that, if you release the gas which makes the pretty patterns from its complex assortment of tubes, it floats silently away and dissipates, leaving not a taste or so much as a whiff of smell behind. Some would make the deduction for themselves in timehis kingdom would never be one of peace. The sentry posts and barbed wire at the frontiers of his land would be there as much to keep the converts in as to keep the invader out.

305 Would he win? She had no assurance that he would not. She knew he must be as aware of her as she was of him, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to see her scrawny black body hung up to the sky on a cross of telephone poles for the crows to pick. She knew that a few of them besides herself had dreamed of crucifixions, but only a few. Those who did had told her but no one else, she suspected. And none of that answered the question: Would he win? That was not for her to know, either. God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him. It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations. It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back. It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head. God was a gamesman-if He had been a mortal, He would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann's general store back in Hemingford Home. He played red to black, white to black. She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game was the candle. He would prevail in His own good time. But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand... and she would not overestimate the dark man's craft and cozening. If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land. Only another private soldier-long past retirement age, it was true!-in the service of the Lord. "Thy will be done," she said, and reached into her apron pocket for a packet of Planters peanuts. Her last doctor, Dr. Staunton, had told her to steer clear of salty foods, but what did he know? She had outlived both of the doctors who had presumed to advise her on her health since her eighty- sixth birthday, and she would have a few peanuts if she wanted to. They hurt her gums mortal bad, but my! weren't they tasty? As she munched, Ralph Brentner came up her walk, his hat with the feather in the band cocked back well on his head. As he tapped on the porch door, he took the hat off. "You awake, Mother?" "That I am," she said through a mouthful of peanuts. "Step in, Ralph, I ain't chewin these nuts, I'm gummin em to death." Ralph laughed and came in. "There's some folk out past the gate that'd like to say howdy, if you ain't too tired. They just got in about an hour ago. A pretty good crew, I'd say. The fella in charge is one of these longhairs, but he seems well about it. Name's Underwood." "Well, bring em up, Ralph, that's fine," she said. "Good enough." He turned to go. "Where's Nick?" she asked him. "Haven't seen him today nor yesterday neither. He gettin too good for homefolks?" "He's been out at the reservoir," Ralph said. "Him and that electrician, Brad Kitchner, have been looking at the power plant." He rubbed the side of his nose. "I was out this morning. Figured all those chiefs orta have at least one Indian to order around." Mother Abagail cackled. She did like Ralph. He was a simple soul, but canny. He had a feel for how things worked. She was not surprised that he had been the one to get what everybody now called Free Zone Radio going. He was the kind of man who wouldn't be afraid to try epoxy on your tractor battery when it started to split open, and if the epoxy did the job, why, he'd just take off his shapeless hat and scratch his balding head and grin that grin, like he was an eleven-year-old kid with the chores done and his fishing pole leaned against his shoulder. He was a good sort to have around when things weren't going just right and the type of man who always somehow ended up on relief when rimes were flush for lust about everyone else. He could put the right sort of valve on your bicycle pump when it wouldn't mate to a tire bigger than the kind that went on a bike and he'd know what was making that funny buzzing noise in your oven just by looking at it, but when he had to deal with a company timeclock, he'd somehow always end up punching in late and punching out early and get fired for it before very long. He'd know you could fertilize corn with pigshit if you mixed it right, and he'd know how to pickle cukes, but he would never be able to understand a car loan agreement, or to figure out how the dealers managed to rook him every time. A job application form filled out by Ralph Brentner would look as if it had been through a Hamilton-Beach blender... misspelled, dogeared, dotted with blots of ink and greasy fingerprints. His employment history would look like a checkerboard which had been around the world on a tramp steamer. But when the very fabric of the world began to tear open, it was the Ralph Brentners who were not afraid to say, "Let's slap a little epoxy in there and see if that'll hold her." And more often than not, it did. "You're a good fella, Ralph, you know it? You're a one." "Why, you are too, Mother. Not that you're a fella, but you know what I mean. Anyhow, that fella Redman came by while we were workin. Wanted to talk to Nick about being on some kind of committee."

306 "And what did Nick say?" "Aw, he wrote a couple of pages. But what it came down to was fine by me if it's fine by Mother Abagail. Is it?" "Well now, what would an old lady like myself have to say about such doings?" "A lot," Ralph said in a serious, almost shocked manner. "You're the reason we're here. I guess we'll do whatever you want," "What I want is to go on livin free like I always have, like an American. I just want my say when it's time for me to have it. Like an American." "Well, you'll have all of that." "The rest feel that way, Ralph?" "You bet they do." "Then that's fine." She rocked serenely. "Time everyone got going. There's people lollygaggin around. Mostly just waitin for somebody to tell em where to squat and lean." "Then I can go ahead?" "With what?" "Well, Nick and Stu ast me if I could find a printing press and maybe get her going, if they got me some electricity to run it. I said I didn't need any electricity, I'd just go down to the high school and find the biggest hand-crank mimeograph I could lay my hands on. They want some fliers." He shook his head. "Do they! Seven hundred. Why, we only got four hundred and some here." "And nineteen out by the gate, probably getting heatstroke while you and me chin. You go bring them in." "I will." Ralph started away. "And Ralph?" He turned back. "Print a thousand," she said.

They filed in through the gate that Ralph opened and she felt her sin, the one she thought of as the mother of sin. The father of sin was theft; every one of the Ten Commandments boiled down to "Thou shalt not steal." Murder was the theft of a life, adultery the theft of a wife, covetousness the secret, slinking theft that took place in the cave of the heart. Blasphemy was the theft of God's name, swiped from the House of the Lord and sent out towalk the streets like a strutting whore. She had never been much of a thief, a minor pilferer from time to time at worst. The mother of sin was pride. Pride was the female side of Satan in the human race, the quiet egg of sin, always fertile. Pride had kept Moses out of Canaan, where the grapes were so big the men had to carry them in slings. Who brought the water from the rock when we were thirsty? the Children of Israel asked, and Moses had answered, I did it. She had always been a proud woman. Proud of the floor she washed on her hands and knees (but Who had provided the hands, the knees, the very water she washed with?), proud that all her children had turned out all right-none in jail ever, none caught by dope or the bottle, none of them frigging around on the wrong side of the sheets-but the mothers of children were the daughters of God. She was proud of her life, but she had not made her life. Pride was the curse of will, and like a woman, pride had its wiles. At her great age she had not learned all its illusions yet, or mastered its glamours. And when they filed through the gate she thought: It's me they've come to see. And on the heels of that sin, a series of blasphemous metaphors, rising unbidden in her mind: how they filed through one by one like communicants, their young leader with his eyes mostly cast down, a light-haired woman by his side, a little boy just behind him with a dark-eyed woman whose black hair was shot with twists of gray. The others behind them in a line. The young man climbed the porch steps, but his woman stopped at the foot. His hair was long, as Ralph had said, but it was clean. He had a considerable growth of reddishgold beard. He had a strong face with freshly etched lines of care in it, around the mouth and across the forehead. "You're really real," he said softly. "Why, I have always thought so," she said. "I am Abagail Freemantle, but most folks round here just call me Mother Abagail. Welcome to our place." "Thank you," he said thickly, and she saw he was struggling with tears. "I'm... we're glad to be here. My name's Larry Underwood. She held her hand out and he took it lightly, with awe, and she felt that twinge of pride again, that stiffneckedness. It was as if he thought she had a fire in her that would burn him. "I... dreamed of you," he said awkwardly. She smiled and nodded and he turned stiffly, almost stumbling. He went back down the steps, shoulders hunched. He would unwind, she thought. Now that he was here and when he found out he didn't have to take the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. A man who doubts himself

307 shouldn't have to try too hard for too long, not until he's seasoned, and this man Larry Underwood was still a little green and apt to bend. But she liked him. His woman, a pretty little thing with eyes like violets, came next. She looked boldly at Mother Abagail, but not scornfully. "I'm Lucy Swann. Pleased to make your acquaintance." And although she was wearing pants, she sketched a little curtsy. "Glad you could come by, Lucy." "Would you mind if I asked... well..." Now her eyes dropped and she began to blush furiously. "A hundred and eight at last count," she said kindly. "Feels more like two hundred and sixteen some days." "I dreamed about you," Lucy said, and then retired in some confusion. The woman with the dark eyes and the boy came next. The woman looked at her gravely and unflinchingly; the boy's face showed frank wonder. The boy was all right. But something about the woman made her feel grave-cold. He's here, she thought. He's come in the shape of this woman.. for behold he comes in more forms than his own... the wolf... the crow... the snake. She was not above feeling fear for herself, and for one instant she felt this strange woman with the white in her hair would reach out, almost casually, and snap her neck. For the one instant the feeling held, Mother Abagail actually fancied that the woman's face was gone and she was looking into a hole in time and space, a hole from which two eyes, dark and damned, stared out at her-eyes that were lost and haggard and hopeless. But it was just a woman, and not him. The dark man would never dare come to her here, even in a shape that was not his own. This was just a woman-a very pretty one, too-with an expressive, sensitive face and one arm about her little boy's shoulders. She had only been daydreaming for a moment. Surely that was all. For Nadine Cross, the moment was a confusion. She had been all right when they came in through the gate. She had been all right until Larry had begun talking to the old lady. Then an almost swooning sense of revulsion and terror had come over her. The old woman could... could what? Could see. Yes. She was afraid that the old woman could see inside her, to where the darkness was already planted and growing well. She was afraid the old woman would rise from her place on the porch and denounce her, demand that she leave Joe and go to those (to him) for whom she was intended. The two of them, each with their own murky fears, looked at each other. They measured each other. The moment was short, but it seemed very long to the two of them. He's in her-the Devil's Imp, Abby Freemantle thought. All of their power is right here, Nadine thought in her own turn. She's all they've got, although they may think differently. Joe was growing restive beside her, tugging at her hand. "Hello," she said in a thin, dead voice. "I'm Nadine Cross." The old woman said: "I know who you are." The words hung in the air, cutting suddenly through the other chatter. People turned, puzzled, to see if something was happening. "Do you?" Nadine said softly. Suddenly it seemed that Joe was her protection, her only one. She moved the boy slowly in front of her, like a hostage. Joe's queer seawater eyes looked up at Mother Abagail. Nadine said: "This is Joe. Do you know him as well?" Mother Abagail's eyes remained locked on the eyes of the woman who called herself Nadine Cross, but a thin shine of perspiration had broken out on the back of her neck. "I don't think Joe's his name any more than mine's Cassandra," she said, "and I don't think you're his mom." She dropped her eyes to the boy with something like relief, unable to suppress a queer feeling that the woman had somehow wonthat she had put the little chap between them, used him to keep her from doing whatever her duty was... ah, but it had come so sudden, and she hadn't been ready for it! What's your name, chap?" she asked the boy. The boy struggled as if a bone were caught in his throat. "He won't tell you," Nadine said, and put a hand on the boy's shoulder. "He can't tell you. I don't think he remem—" Joe threw it off and that seemed to break the block. "Leo!" he said with sudden force and great clarity. "Leo Rockway, that's me! I'm Leo!" And he sprang into Mother Abagail's arms, laughing. That generated laughter and some applause from the crowd. Nadine became virtually unnoticed, and Abby felt again that some vital focus, some vital chance, had ebbed away. "Joe," Nadine called. Her face was remote, under control again. The boy drew away a bit from Mother Abagail and looked at her. "Come away," Nadine said, and now she looked unflinchingly at Abby, speaking not to the boy but directly at her. "She's old. You'll hurt her. She's very old and... not very strong."

308 "Oh, I think I'm strong enough to love a chap like him a bit," Mother Abagail said, but her voice sounded oddly uncertain in her own ears. "He looks like he's had a hard road." "Well, he's tired now. And you are, too, from the look. Come on, Joe." "I love her," the boy said, not moving. Nadine seemed to flinch at that. Her voice sharpened. "Come away, Joe!" "That's not my name! Leo! Leo! That's my name!" The little crowd of new pilgrims quieted again, aware that something unexpected had happened, might be happening still, but unable to know what. The two women locked eyes again like sabers. I know who you are, Abby's eyes said. Nadine's answered: Yes. And I know you. But this time it was Nadine who dropped her eyes first. "All right," she said. "Leo, or whatever you like. Just come away before you tire her any more." He left Mother Abagail's arms, but reluctantly. "You come back and see me whenever you want," Abby said, but she did not raise her eyes to include Nadine. "Okay," the boy said, and blew her a kiss. Nadine's face was stony. She didn't speak. As they went back down the porch steps, the arm Nadine had around his shoulders seemed more like a dragchain than a comfort. Mother Abagail watched them go, aware that she was losing the focus again. With the woman's face out of her sight, the sense of revelation began to grow fuzzy. She became unsure of what she had felt. She was only another woman, surely... wasn't she? The young man, Underwood, was standing at the base of the steps, and his face was like a thundercloud. "Why were you like that?" he asked the woman, and although he'd lowered his voice, Mother Abagail could still hear perfectly well. The woman paid no attention. She went by him without a word. The boy looked at Underwood in a beseeching way, but the woman was in charge, at least for the time being, and the little boy let her bear him along, bear him away. There was a moment of silence, and she suddenly felt at a loss to fill it, although it needed to be filled—didn't it? Wasn't it her job to fill it? And a voice asked softly, Is it? Is that your job? Is that why God brought you here, woman? To be the Official Greeter at the gates of the Free Zone? I can't think, she protested. The woman was right: I AM tired. He comes in more shapes than his own, the small interior voice persisted. Wolf, crow, snake... woman. What did it mean? What had happened here? What, in God's name? I was sitting here complacently, waiting to be kowtowed to-yes, that's what I was doing, no use denying it-and now that woman has come and something has happened and I'm losing what it was. But there was something about that woman... wasn't there? Are you sure? Are you sure? There was an instant of silence, and in it they all seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to prove herself. And she wasn't doing it. The woman and the boy were gone from sight; they had left as if they were the true believers and she nothing but a shoddy, grinning Sanhedrin they had seen through immediately. Oh, but I'm old! It's not fair! And on the heels of that came another voice, small and low and rational, a voice that was not her own: Not too old to know the woman is Now another man had approached her in hesitant, deferential fashion. "Hi, Mother Abagail," he said. "The name's Zellman. Mark Zellman. From Lowville, New York. I dreamed about you." And she was faced with a sudden choice that was clear-cut for only an instant in her groping mind. She could acknowledge this man's hello, banter with him a little to set him at his ease (but not too much at ease; that was not precisely what she wanted), and then go on to the next and the next and the next, receiving their homage like new palm leaves, or she could ignore him and the rest. She could follow the thread of her thought down into the depths of herself, searching for whatever it was that the Lord meant her to know. The woman is —what? Did it matter? The woman was gone. "I had me a great-nephew lived in upstate New York one time," she said easily to Mark Zellman. "Town named Rouses Point. Backed right up against Vermont on Lake Champlain, it is. Probably never heard of it, have you?" Mark Zellman said he sure had heard of it; just about everyone in New York State knew that town. Had he ever been there? His face broke tragically. No, never had. Always meant to.

309 "From what Ronnie wrote in his letters, you didn't miss much," she said, and Zellman went away beaming broadly. The others came up to make their manners as the other parties had done before them, as still others would do in the days and weeks to come. A teenage boy named Tony Donahue. A fellow named Jack Jackson, who was a car mechanic. A young R. N. named Laurie Constable-she would come in handy. An old man named Richard Farris whom everyone called the Judge; he looked at her keenly and almost made her feel uncomfortable again. Dick Vollman. Sandy DuChiens-pretty name, that, French. Harry Dunbarton, a man who had sold spectacles for a living only three months ago. Andrea Terminello. A Smith. A Rennett. And a great many others. She spoke to them all, nodded, smiled, and put them at their ease, but the pleasure she had felt on other days was gone today and she felt only the aches in her wrists and fingers and knees, plus the gnawing suspicion that she had to go use the Port-O-San and if she didn't get there soon she was going to stain her dress. All of that and the feeling, fading now (and it would be entirely gone by nightfall), that she had missed something of great significance and might later be very sorry.

He thought better when he wrote, and so he jotted down everything which might be of importance in outline, using two felt-tip pens: a blue and a black. Nick Andros sat in the study of the house on Baseline Drive that he shared with Ralph Brentner and Ralph's woman, Elise. It was almost dark. The house was a beauty, sitting below the bulk of Flagstaff Mountain but quite a bit above the town of Boulder proper, so that from the wide living room window the streets and roads of the municipality appeared spread out like a gigantic gameboard. That window was treated on the outside with some sort of silvery reflective stuff, so that the squire could look out but passersby could not look in. Nick guessed that the house was in the $450,000-$500,000 range... and the owner and his family were mysteriously absent. On his own long journey from Shoyo to Boulder, first by himself, then with Tom Cullen and the others, he had passed through tens of dozens of towns and cities, and all of them had been stinking charnel houses. Boulder had no business being any different... but it was. There were corpses here, yes, thousands of them, and something was going to have to be done about them before the hot, dry days ended and the fall rains began, causing quicker decomposition and possible disease... but there were not enough corpses. Nick wondered if anyone other than he and Stu Redman had noticed it... Lauder, maybe. Lauder noticed almost everything. For every house or public building you found littered with corpses, there were ten others completely empty. Sometime, during the last spasm of the plague, most of Boulder's citizens, sick or well, had blown town. Why? Well, he supposed it really didn't matter, and maybe they would never know. The awesome fact remained that Mother Abagail, sight unseen, had managed to lead them to maybe the one small city in the United States that had been cleared of plague victims. It was enough to make even an agnostic like himself wonder where she was getting her information. Nick had taken three rooms on the basement level of the house, and nice rooms they were, furnished in knotty pine. No urging on Ralph's part had moved him to enlarge his living space-he felt like an interloper already, but he liked them... and until his trip from Shoyo to Hemingford Home he hadn't realized how much he had come to miss other faces. He hadn't gotten his fill yet. And the place was the finest one he'd ever lived in, just as it was. He had his own entrance by the back door, and he kept his ten-speed parked under the door's low, overhanging eave, where it stood axle-deep in generations of fragrantly rotting aspen leaves. He had the beginnings of a book collection, something he had always wanted and never been able to have in his years of wandering. He had been a great reader in those days (during these new days, there rarely seemed to be time to sit and have a good long conversation with a book), and some of the books on the shelves—shelves which were still largely empty-were old friends, most of them originally borrowed from lending libraries at two cents a day; in the last few years he had never spent enough time in one town to get a regular library card. Others were books he hadn't yet read, books the lending library books had led him to look for. As he sat here with his felttip pens and paper, one of these books sat on the desk beside his right hand-Set This House on Fire, by William Styron. He had marked his place with a ten-dollar bill he had found on the street. There was a lot of money in the streets, blowing along the gutters in the wind, and he was still surprised and amused at how many people-himself among them-still stopped to pick them up. And why? The books were free now. The ideas were free. Sometimes that thought exhilarated him. Sometimes it frightened him. The paper he was writing on came from a ring binder in which he kept all his thoughts—the contents of the binder were half diary, half shopping list. He had discovered a deep fondness in himself for making lists; he thought one of his forebears must have been an accountant. When your mind was troubled, he had discovered that making a list often set it at ease again. He went back to the fresh page before him, doodling formlessly in the margin. It seemed to him that all the things they wanted or needed from the old life were stored in the silent East Boulder power plant, like dusty treasure in a dark cupboard. An unpleasant feeling

310 seemed to run through the people who had gathered in Boulder, a feeling just submerged below the surface-they were like a scared bunch of kids knocking around in the local haunted house after dark. In some ways, the place was like a rancid ghost town. There was a sense that being here was a strictly temporary thing. There was one man, a fellow named Impening, who had once lived in Boulder and worked on one of the custodial crews at the IBM plant out on the Boulder-Longmont Diagonal. Impening seemed determined to stir up unrest. He was going around telling people that in 1984 there had been an inch and a half of snow in Boulder by September 14, and that by November it would be cold enough to freeze the balls off abrass monkey. That was the kind of talk Nick would like to put a quick stop to. Never mind that if Impening had been in the army he would have been cashiered for such talk; that was an empty logic, if it was logic at all. The important thing was that Impening's words would have no power if people could move into houses where the lights worked and where the furnaces blew hot air up through grates at the touch of a finger on a button. If that didn't happen by the time the first coldsnap arrived, Nick was afraid that people would begin simply to slip away, and all the meetings, representatives, and ratifications in the world wouldn't stop that. According to Ralph, there wasn't that much wrong at the power plant, at least not that much visible. The crews who ran it had shut some of the machinery down; other machinery had shut itself down. Two or three of the big turbine engines had blown, perhaps as the result of some final power surge. Ralph said that some of the wiring would have to be replaced, but he thought that he and Brad Kitchner and a crew of a dozen warm bodies could do that. A much bigger work crew was needed to remove fused and blackened copper wire from the blown turbine generators and then install new copper wire by the yard. There was plenty of copper wire in the Denver supply houses for the taking; Ralph and Brad had gone one day last week to check for themselves. With the manpower, they thought they could have the lights on again by Labor Day. "And then we'll throw the biggest fucking party this town ever saw," Brad said. Law and Order. That was something else that troubled him. Could Stu Redman be handed that particular package? He wouldn't want the job, but Nick thought he could perhaps persuade Stu to take it... and if push came to shove, he could get Stu's friend Glen to back him up. What really bothered him was the memory, still too fresh and hurtful to look at more than briefly, of his own brief and terrible tour as Shoyo's jailkeeper. Vince and Billy dying, Mike Childress jumping up and down on his supper and crying out in wretched defiance: Hunger strike! I'm on a fuckin hunger strike! It made him ache inside to think they might need courts and jails... maybe even an executioner. Christ, these were Mother Abagail's people, not the dark man's! But he supposed the dark man would not bother with such trivialities as courts and jails. His punishment would be swift and sure and heavy. He would not need the threat of jail when the corpses hung on the telephone pole crosses along I-15 for the birds to pick. Nick hoped most of the infractions would be small ones. There had been several cases of drunk and disorderly already. One kid, really too young to drive, had been rodding a big dragging machine up and down Broadway, scaring people out of the street. He had finally driven into a stalled bread truck and had gashed his forehead-and lucky to get off so cheaply, in Nick's opinion. The people who had seen him knew he was too young, but no one had felt he or she had the authority to put a stop to it. Authority. Organization. He wrote the words on his pad and put them inside a double circle. Being Mother Abagail's people gave them no immunity to weakness, stupidity, or bad companions. Nick didn't know if they were the children of God or not, but when Moses had come down from the mountain, those not busy worshipping the golden calf had been busy shooting craps, he knew that. And they had to face the possibility that someone might get cut over a card game or decide to shoot someone else over a woman. Authority. Organization. He circled the words again and now they were like prisoners behind a triple stockade. How well they went together... and what a sorry sound they made.

Not long after, Ralph came in. "We got some more folks coming in tomorrow, Nicky, and a whole parade the day after. Over thirty in that second one." "Good," Nick wrote. "We'll get a doc before long, I bet. Law of averages says so." "Yeah," Ralph said. "We're turnip into a regular by-God city." Nick nodded. "I had a talk with the fella leadin the party that came in today. His name's Larry Underwood. Smart man, Nick. Sharp as a tack." Nick raised his eyebrows and drew a? in the air. "Well, let's see," Ralph said. He knew what the question mark meant: give more information, if you can. "He's six or seven years older'n you, I think, and maybe eight or nine younger than Redman. But he's the kind of man you said we ought to be on the lookout for. He asks the right questions."

311 ? "Who's in charge, for one," Ralph said. "What comes next, for another. Who does it, for a third." Nick nodded. Yes-the right questions. But was he the right man? Ralph might be right. He also might not be. "I'll try to meet up with him tomorrow & say hello," he wrote on a fresh sheet of paper. "Yeah, you oughtta. He's all right." Ralph shuffled his feet. "And I talked to Mother a little bit before this Underwood and his folks came up to be innerduced. Talked to her like you wanted me to." ? "She says we ought to go ahead. Get moving. She says there's people lollygaggin, and they need some folks to be in charge and tell em where to squat and lean." Nick leaned back in his chair and laughed silently. Then he wrote, "I was pretty sure she'd feel that way. I'll talk to Stu & Glen tomorrow. Did you print the handbills?" "Oh! Those! Shit, yeah," Ralph said. "That's where I been most of the afternoon, for Christ's sake." He showed Nick a sample poster. Still smelling strongly of mimeograph ink, the print was large and eyecatching. Ralph had done the graphics himself:

MASS MEETING!!! REPRESENTATIVE BOARD TO BE NOMINATED AND ELECTED!

8:30 P. M., August 18, 1990

Place: Canyon Boulevard Park & Bandshell if FINE Chautauqua Hall in Chautauqua Park if FOUL

REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED FOLLOWING THE MEETING

Below this were two rudimentary street maps for newcomers and those who hadn't spent much time exploring Boulder. Below, in rather fine print, were the names he and Stu and Glen had agreed upon after some discussion earlier in the day:

Ad Hoc Committee

Nick Andros Glen Bateman Ralph Brentner Richard Ellis Fran Goldsmith Stuart Redman Susan Stern

Nick pointed to the line on the flier about refreshments and raised his eyebrows. "Oh yeah, well, Frannie came by and said we'd be more apt to get everybody if we had something. She and her friend there, Patty Kroger, they're going to see to it. Cookies and Za-Rex." Ralph made a face. "If it came down to a choice between drinking Za-Rex and bullpiss, I'd have to sit down and think her over. You c'n have mine, Nicky." Nick grinned. "The only thing about this," Ralph went on more seriously, "is you guys putting me on this committee. I know what that word means. It means `Congratulations, you get to do all the hard work. ' Well, I don't really mind that, I been workin hard all my life. But committees are supposed to have idears, and I ain't much of an idear man." On his pad, Nick quickly sketched a big CB setup, and in the background a radio tower with bolts of electricity coming from its top. "Yeah, but that's a lot different," Ralph said glumly: "You'll be fine," Nick wrote. "Believe it." "If you say so, Nicky. I'll give her a try. I still think you'd be better off with this Underwood fella, though." Nick shook his head and clapped Ralph on the shoulder. Ralph bid him goodnight and went upstairs. When he was gone, Nick looked thoughtfully at the handbill for a long time. If Stu and Glen had seen copies-and he was sure they had by now-they knew that he had unilaterally stricken Harold Lauder's name from their list of ad hoc committee members. He didn't know how they might

312 be taking it, but the fact that they hadn't shown up at his door yet was probably a good sign. They might want him to do some horsetrading of his own, and if he had to, he would do it, just to keep Harold out at the top. If he had to, he would give them Ralph. Ralph didn't really want the position anyway, although, goddammit, Ralph had great native wit and the nearly priceless ability to think around the corners of problems. He would be a good man to have on the permanent committee, and he felt that Stu and Glen had already packed the committee with their friends. If he, Nick, wanted Lauder out, they would just have to go along. To pull off this leadership coup smoothly, there had to be no dissension at all among them. Say, Ma, how did that man get a rabbit to come out of that hat? Well, son, I'm not sure, but I think he might have used the old "misdirect 'em with cookies and Za-Rex" trick. It works just about every time. He turned back to the page he had been doodling on when Ralph came in. He stared at the words he had circled not just once but three times, as if to keep them in. Authority. Organization. He suddenly wrote another one below them-there was just room. Now the words in the triple circle read: Authority. Organization. Politics. But he wasn't trying to knock Lauder out of the picture just because he felt Stu and Glen Bateman were trying to hog what was really his football. He felt a certain amount of pique, sure. It would have been odd if he hadn't. In a way, he, Ralph, and Mother Abagail had founded the Boulder Free Zone. There's hundreds of people here now and thousands more on their way if Bateman's right, he thought, tapping his pencil against the circled words. The longer he looked at them, the uglier they seemed. But when Ralph and I and Mother and Tom Cullen and the rest in our party got here, the only living things in Boulder were the cats and the deer that had come down here from the state park to forage in people's gardens... and even in the stores. Remember that one that got into the Table Mesa Supermarket somehow and then couldn't get out? It was crazy, running up and down the aisles, knocking things over, falling down, then getting up and running again. We're Johnny-come-latelies, sure, we haven't even been here a month yet, but we were first! So there's a little pique, but pique isn't the reason I want Harold out. I want him out because I don't trust him. He smiles all the time, but there's a watertight (smiletight?) compartment between his mouth and his eyes. There was some friction between him and Stu at one time, over Frannie, and all three of them say it's over, but I wonder if it really is over. Sometimes I see Frannie looking at Harold, and she looks uneasy. She looks as if she's trying to figure out how over" this over really is. He's bright enough, but he strikes me as unstable. Nick shook his head. That wasn't all. On more than one occasion he had wondered if Harold Lauder might not be crazy. Mostly it's that grin. I don't want to have to share secrets with anyone who grins like that and looks as if he isn't sleeping well at night. No Lauder. They'll have to go along with that. Nick closed his ring-binder and put it away in the bottom drawer of his desk. Then he stood up and began taking off his clothes. He wanted a shower. He felt obscurely dirty. The world, he thought, not according to Garp but according to the superflu. This brave new world. But it didn't seem particularly brave to him, or particularly new. It was as if someone had put a large cherry bomb into a child's toybox. There had been a big bang and everything had gone everywhere. Toys had scattered from one end of the playroom to the other. Some things were shattered beyond repair, other things would be fixable, but most of the stuff had just been scattered. Those things were still a little too hot to handle, but they would be fine once they had cooled off. Meanwhile, the job was to sort things out. Throw away the things which were no longer good. Set aside the toys which could be fixed. List everything which was still okay. Get a new toybox to put the things in, a nice new toybox. A strong toybox. There is a frightening, sickening ease-and a clear attraction-to the way in which things can be blown apart. The hard job is bringing things together again. The sorting. The fixing. The listing. And discarding the things which are no good, of course. Except... can you ever bring yourself to throw away the things which are no good? Nick paused halfway to the bathroom, naked, his clothes held in his arms. Oh, the night was so silent... but weren't all his nights symphonies of silence? Why had his body suddenly broke out in gooseflesh? Why, because he suddenly felt that it was not toys the Free Zone Committee would be in charge of picking up, not toys at all. He suddenly felt that he had joined some bizarre sewing circle of the human spirit-he and Redman and Bateman and Mother Abagail, yes, even Ralph with his big radio and his boosting equipment that sent the Free Zone signal flying far and wide across the dead continent. They each had a needle and perhaps they were working together to make a warm blanket

313 to keep off the winter chill... or perhaps they had only, after a brief pause, begun once again to make a large shroud for the human race, beginning their work at the toes and working their way up.

After love, Stu had gone to sleep. He had been on short sleep rations lately, and the night before he had been up all night with Glen Bateman, getting drunk and planning for the future. Frannie had put on her robe and come out here on the balcony. The building they lived in was downtown, on the corner of Pearl Street and Broadway. Their apartment was on the third floor, and below her she could see the intersection, Pearl running east- west, Broadway running north-south. She liked it here. They had the compass boxed. The night was warm and windless, the black stone of the sky flawed with a million stars. In their faint and frosty glow, Fran could see the slabs of the Flatirons rising in the west. She passed a hand down from her neck to her thighs. The dressing gown she wore was silk, and she was naked underneath. Her hand passed smoothly over her breasts and then, instead of continuing on flat and straight to the mild rise of her pubis, her hand traced an arc of belly, following a curve that had not been this pronounced even two weeks ago. She was beginning to show, not a lot yet, but Stu had commented on it this evening. His question had been casual enough, even comic: How long can we do it without me, uh, squeezing him? Or her, she had answered, amused. How does four months sound, Chief? Fine, he had answered, and slipped deliciously into her. Earlier talk had been much more serious. Not long after they got to Boulder, Stu had told her he had discussed the baby with Glen and Glen had advanced the idea, very cautiously, that the superflu germ or virus might still be around. If so, the baby might die. It was an unsettling thought (you could always, she thought, count on Glen Bateman for an Unsettling Thought or two), but surely if the mother was immune, the baby...? Yet there were plenty of people here who had lost children to the plague. Yes, but that would mean— Would mean what? Well, for one thing, it might mean that all these people here were just an epilogue to the human race, a brief coda. She didn't want to believe that, couldn't believe it. If that were true Someone was coming up the street, turning sideways to slip between a dumptruck that had stalled with two of its wheels on the pavement and the wall of a restaurant called the Pearl Street Kitchen. He had a light jacket slung over one shoulder and was carrying something in one hand that was either a bottle or a gun with a long barrel. In the other hand he had a sheet of paper, probably with an address written on it from the way he was checking street numbers. At last he stopped in front of their building. He was looking at the door as if trying to decide what to do next. Frannie thought he looked a little like a private detective in some old TV series. She was standing less than twenty feet above his head, and she found herself in one of those situations. If she called him, she might scare him. If she didn't, he might start knocking and wake Stuart up. And what was he doing with a gun in his hand anyway... if it was a gun? He suddenly craned his neck and looked up, probably to see if any lights were on in the building. Frannie was still looking down. They peered directly into each other's eyes. "Holy God!" the man on the sidewalk cried. He took an involuntary step backward, went off the sidewalk into the gutter, and sat down hard. "Oh!" Frannie said at the same moment, and took her own step backward on the balcony. There was a spider-plant in a large pottery vase on a pedestal behind her. Frannie's behind struck it. It tottered, almost decided to live a little longer, and then defenestrated itself on the balcony's slate flags with a loud crash. In the bedroom, Stu grunted, turned over, and was still again. Frannie, perhaps predictably, was seized with the giggles. She put both hands over her mouth and pinched viciously at her lips, but the giggles came out anyway in a series of hoarse little whispers. Grace strikes again, she thought, and whisper-giggled madly into her cupped hands. If he'd had a guitar I could have dropped the damned vase on his head. O sole mio... CRASH! Her belly hurt from trying to hold in the giggles. A conspiratorial whisper wafted its way up from below: "Hey, you... you on the balcony... psssst!" "Pssst," Frannie whispered to herself. "Pssst, oh great." She had to get out before she started hee-hawing away like a donkey. She had never been able to hold in her laughter once it got hold of her. She ran fleetly across the darkened bedroom, snatched a more substantial-and demure=wrapper from the back of the bathroom door, and went down the hall struggling it on, her face working like a rubber mask. She let herself out onto the landing and got down one flight before the laughter escaped her and flew free. She went down the lower two flights cackling wildly.

314 The man—a young man, she saw now—had picked him self up and was brushing himself off. He was slim and well built, most of his face covered with a beard that might be blond or possibly sandy- red by daylight. There were dark circles under his eyes, but he was smiling a rueful little smile. "What did you knock over?" he asked. "It sounded like a piano." "It was a vase," she said. "It... it..." But then the giggles caught her again and she could only point a finger at him and laugh quietly and shake her head and then hold her aching belly again. Tears rolled down her cheeks. "You really looked funny... I know that's a hell of a thing to say to somebody you just met but .., oh, my! You did!" "If this was the old days," he said, grinning, "my next move would be to sue you for at least a quarter of a million. Whiplash. Judge, I looked up and this young woman was peering down at me. Yes, I believe she was making a face. Her face was on, at any rate. We find for the plaintiff, this poor boy. Also for the bailiff. There will be a ten-minute recess." They laughed together a little. The young man was wearing clean faded jeans and a dark blue shirt. The summer night was warm and kind, and Frannie was beginning to be glad she had come out." "Your name wouldn't happen to be Fran Goldsmith, would it?" "It so happens. But I don't know you." "Larry Underwood. We just came in today. Actually, I was looking for a fellow named Harold Lauder. They said he was living at 261 Pearl along with Stu Redman and Frannie Goldsmith and some other people." That dried her giggles up. "Harold was in the building when we first got to Boulder, but he split quite a while ago. He's on Arapahoe now, on the west side of town. I can give you his address if you want it, and directions." "I'd appreciate that. But I'll wait until tomorrow to go over, I guess. I'm not risking this action again." "Do you know Harold?" "I do and I don't—the same way I do and don't know you. Although I have to be honest and say you don't look the way I pictured you. In my mind I saw you as a Valkyrie type blonde right out of a Frank Frazetta painting, probably with a . 45 on each hip. But I'm pleased to meet you any way." He stuck out his hand and Frannie shook it with a bewildered little smile. "I'm afraid I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about." "Sit down on the curb a minute and I'll tell you." She sat. A ghost of a breeze riffled up the street, shuffling scraps of paper and making the old elms move on the courthouse lawn three blocks farther down. "I've got some stuff for Harold Lauder," Larry said. "But it's supposed to be a surprise, so if you see him before I do, mum's the word and all that." "Okay, sure," Frannie said. She was more mystified than ever. He held up the long-barreled gun and it wasn't a gun at all; it was a wine bottle with a long neck. She tilted the label to the starlight and could just barely read the large print= BORDEAUX at the top, and at the bottom, the date: 1947. "The best vintage Bordeaux in this century," he said. "At least that's what an old friend of mine used to say. His name was Rudy. God love and rest his soul." "But 1947... that's forty-three years ago. Won't it be... well, gone over?" "Rudy used to say a good Bordeaux never went over. Anyway, I've carried it all the way from Ohio. If it's bad wine, it'll be well-traveled bad wine." "And that's for Harold?" "That and a bunch of these." He took something out of his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She didn't have to turn this up to the starlight to read the print. She burst out laughing. "A Payday candybar!" she exclaimed. "Harold's favorite... but how could you know that?" "That's the story." "Then tell me!" "Well, then. Once upon a time there was a fellow named Larry Underwood who came from California to New York to see his dear old mother. That wasn't the only reason he came, and the other reasons were a little less pleasant, but let's stick to the nice-guy reason, shall we?" "Why not?" Fran agreed. "And behold, the Wicked Witch of the West, or some Pentagon assholes, visited the country with a great plague, and before you could say, `Here comes Captain Trips,' just about everyone in New York was dead. Including Larry's mother." "I'm sorry. My mom and dad, too." "Yeah-everybody's mom and dad. If we all sent each other sympathy cards, there wouldn't be any left. But Larry was one of the lucky ones. He made it out of the city with a lady named Rita who

315 wasn't very well equipped to deal with what had happened. And unfortunately, Larry wasn't very well equipped to help her deal with it." "No one had the equipment." "But some developed it quicker than others. Anyhow, Larry and Rita headed for the coast of Maine. They made it as far as Vermont, and there the lady OD'd on sleeping pills." "Oh, Larry, that is too bad." "Larry took it very hard. In fact, he took it as a more or less divine judgment on his strength of character. In further fact, he had been told by one or two people who should have known that his most incorruptible character trait was a splendid streak of self-interest, which came shining through like a DayGlo madonna sitting on the dashboard of a 'S9 Cadillac." Frannie shifted a bit on the curb. "I hope I'm not making you uncomfortable, but all of this has been sloshing around inside for a long time, and it does have some bearing on the Harold part of the story. Okay?" "Okay." "Thanks. I think that ever since we stopped by and met that old woman today I've been looking for a friendly face so I could spill this. I just thought it would be Harold's. Anyway-Larry continued on to Maine because there didn't seem to be anyplace else to go. He was having very bad dreams by then, but since he was alone he had no way of knowing that other people were having them, too. He simply assumed it was another symptom of his continuing mental breakdown. But eventually he made it to a small coastal town named Wells, where he met a woman named Nadine Cross and a strange little boy whose name turns out to be Leo Rockway." "Wells," she marveled softly. "Anyway, the three travelers sort of flipped a coin to see which way they should head on US 1, and since it came up tails, they headed down south where they eventually came to—" "Ogunquit!" Frannie said, delighted. "Just so. And there, on a barn, in huge letters, I made my first acquaintance with Harold Lauder and Frances Goldsmith." "Harold's sign! Oh, Larry, he will be pleased!" "We followed the directions on the barn to Stovington, and the directions at Stovington to Nebraska and the directions at Mother Abagail's house to Boulder. We met people along the way. One of them was a girl named Lucy Swann, who's my woman. I'd like you to meet her sometime. I think you'd like her. "By then something had happened that Larry didn't really want. His little party of four grew to six. The six met four more in upstate New York, and our party absorbed theirs. By the time we made it to Harold's sign in Mother Abagail's dooryard there were sixteen of us, and we picked up another three just as we were leaving. Larry was in charge of this brave band. There was no vote or anything like that. It just was. And he really didn't want the responsibility. It was a drag. It was keeping him awake nights. He started popping Turns and Rolaids. But it's funny the way your mind boxes your mind. I couldn't let it go. It got to be a self-respect thing. And I-he—was always afraid he was going to fuck it up righteously, that he'd get up some morning and someone would be dead in their sleeping bag the way Rita was that time in Vermont and everyone would be standing around pointing their fingers and saying, `It's your fault. You didn't know any better and it's your fault. ' And that was something I couldn't talk about, not even to the Judge—" "Who's the Judge?" "Judge Farris. An old guy from Peoria. I guess he really was a judge at one time back in the early fifties, circuit judge or something, but he'd been retired a long time when the flu hit. He's plenty sharp, though. When he looks at you, you'd swear he has X-ray eyes. Anyhow, Harold was important to me. He got to be more important as there got to be more people. In direct ratio, you might say." He chuckled a little. "That barn. Man! The last line of that sign, the one with your name, was so low I figured he really must have been hanging ass out to the wind when he painted it on." "Yes. I was sleeping when he did that. I would have made him stop." "I started to get a sense of him," Larry said. "I found a Payday wrapper in the cupola of that barn in Ogunquit, and then the carving on the beam—" "What carving?" She felt that Larry was studying her in the dark, and she pulled her robe a little closer around her... not a gesture of modesty, because she felt no threat from this man, but one of nervousness. "Just his initials," Larry said casually. "H. E. L. If that had been the end of it, I wouldn't be here now. But then at the motorcycle dealership in Wells—" "We were there!" "I know you were. I saw a couple of bikes gone. What made an even bigger impression was that Harold had siphoned some gas from the underground tank. You must have helped him, Fran. I damn near lost my fingers." "No, I didn't have to. Harold hunted around until he found something he called a plug-vent"

316 Larry groaned and slapped his forehead. "Plug-vent! Jesus! I never even looked for where they were venting the tank! You mean he just hunted around... pulled a plug... and put his hose in?" . "Well... yes." "Oh, Harold," Larry said in a tone of admiration that she had never heard before, at least not in connection with Harold Lauder's name. "Well, that's one of his tricks I missed. Anyway, we got to Stovington. And Nadine was so upset she fainted." "I cried," Fran said. "I bawled until it seemed I'd never stop. I just had my mind made up that when we got there, someone would welcome us in and say, `Hi! Step inside, delousing on the right, cafeteria's on your left. ' " She shook her head. "That seems so silly now." "I was not dismayed. Dauntless Harold had been there before me, left his sign, and gone on. I felt like a tenderfoot Easterner following that Indian from The Pathfinder." His view of Harold both fascinated and amazed her. Hadn't Stu really been leading the party by the time they left Vermont and struck out for Nebraska? She couldn't honestly remember. By then they had all been preoccupied with the dreams. Larry was reminding her of things she had forgotten... or worse, taken for granted. Harold risking his life to put that sign on the barn-it had seemed like a foolish risk to her, but it had done some good after all. And getting gas from that underground tank... it had apparently been a major operation for Larry, but Harold had seemed to take it purely as a matter of course. It made her feel small and made her feel guilty. They all more or less assumed that Harold was nothing but a grinning supernumerary. But Harold had turned quite a few tricks in the last six weeks. Had she been so much in love with Stu that it took this total stranger to point out some home truths about Harold? What made the feeling even more uncomfortable was the fact that, once he had gotten his feet under him, Harold had been completely adult about herself and Stuart. Larry said, "So here's another neat sign, complete with route numbers, at Stovington, right? And fluttering in the grass next to it, another Payday candy wrapper. I felt like instead of following broken sticks and bent grasses, I was following Harold's trail of chocolate Paydays. Well, we didn't follow your route the whole way. We bent north near Gary, Indiana, because there was one hell of a fire, still burning in places. It looked like every damn oiltank in the city went up. Anyhow, we picked up the Judge on the detour, stopped by Hemingford Home-we knew she was gone by then, the dreams you know, but we all wanted to see that place just the same. The corn... the tire-swing... you know what I mean?" "Yes," Frannie said quietly. "Yes, I do." "And all the time I'm going crazy, thinking that something is going to happen, we're going to get attacked by a motorcycle gang or something, run out of water, I don't know. "There used to be a book my mom had, she got it from her grandmother or something. In His Steps, that was the name of it. And there were all these little stories about guys with horrible problems. Ethical problems, most of them. And the guy who wrote the book said that to solve the problems, all you had to do was ask, `What would Jesus do?' It always cleared the trouble right up. You know what I think? It's a Zen question, not really a question at all but a way to clear your mind, like saying Om and looking at the tip of your nose." Fran smiled. She knew what her mother would have said about something like that. "So when I really started to get wound up, Lucy-that's my girl, did I tell you?-Lucy would say, `Hurry up, Larry, ask the question. '" "What would Jesus do?" Fran said, amused. "No, what would Harold do?" Larry answered seriously. Fran was nearly dumbfounded. She could not help wishing to be around when Larry actually met Harold. Whatever in the world would his reaction be? "We camped in this farmyard one night and we really were almost out of water. The place had a well, but no way of drawing it up, naturally, because the power was off and the pump wouldn't work. And Joe-Leo, I'm sorry, his real name is Leo-Leo kept walking by and saying, `Firsty, Larry, pwetty firsty now. ' And he was driving me bugshit. I could feel myself tightening up, and the next time he came by I probably would have hit him. Nice guy, huh? Getting ready to hit a disturbed child. But a person can't change all at once. I've had plenty of time to work that out for myself." "You brought them all across from Maine intact," Frannie said. "One of ours died. His appendix burst. Stu tried to operate on him, but it was no good. All in all, Larry, I'd say you did pretty well." "Harold and I did pretty well," he corrected. "Anyway, Lucy said, `Quick, Larry, ask the question. ' So I did. There was a windmill on the place that ran water up to the barn. It was turning pretty good, but there wasn't any water coming out of the barn faucets either. So I opened the big case at the foot of the windmill, where all the machinery was, and I saw that the main driveshaft had popped out of its hole. I got it back in and bingo! All the water you could want. Cold and tasty. Thanks to Harold." "Thanks to you. Harold wasn't really there, Larry."

317 "Well, he was in my head. And now I'm here and I brought him the wine and the candybars." He looked at her sideways. "You know, I kind of thought he might be your man." She shook her head and looked down at her clasped fingers. "No. He... not Harold." He didn't say anything for a long time, but she felt him looking at her. At last he said, "Okay, how have I got it wrong? About Harold?" She stood up. "I ought to go in now. It's been nice to meet you, Larry. Come by tomorrow and meet Stu. Bring your Lucy, if she's not busy." "What is it about him?" he insisted, standing with her. "Oh, I don't know," she said thickly. Suddenly the tears were very close. "You make me feel as if... as if I've treated Harold very shabbily and I don't know... why or how I did it... can I be blamed for not loving him the way I do Stu? Is that supposed to be my fault?" "No, of course not." Larry looked taken aback. "Listen, I'm sorry. I barged in on you. I'll go." "He's changed!" Frannie burst out. "I don't know how or why, and sometimes I think it might be for the better... but I don't... don't really know. And sometimes I'm afraid." "Afraid of Harold?" She didn't answer; only looked down at her feet. She thought she had already said too much. "You were going to tell me how I could get there?" he asked gently. "It's easy. Just go straight out Arapahoe until you come to the little park... the Eben G. Fine Park, I think it is. The park's on the right. Harold's little house is on the left, just across from it." "All right, thanks. Meeting you was a pleasure, Fran, busted vase and all." She smiled, but it was perfunctory. All of the dizzy good humor had gone out of the evening. Larry raised the bottle of wine and offered his slanted little smile. "And if you see him before I do... keep a secret, huh?" "Sure." "Night, Frannie." He walked back the way he had come. She watched him out of sight, then went upstairs and slipped into bed next to Stu, who was still out like a light. Harold, she thought, pulling the covers up to her chin. How was she supposed to tell this Larry, who seemed so nice in his strangely lost way (but weren't they all lost now?), that Harold Lauder was fat and juvenile and lost himself? Was she supposed to tell him that one day not so long ago she had happened upon wise Harold, resourceful Harold, what-would-Jesus-do Harold, mowing the back lawn in his bathing suit and weeping? Was she supposed to tell him that the sometimes sulky, often frightened Harold that had come to Boulder from Ogunquit had turned into a stout politician, a backslapper, a hail-fellow-well-met type of guy who nonetheless looked at you with the flat and unsmiling eyes of a gila monster? She thought her wait for sleep might be very long tonight. Harold had fallen hopelessly in love with her' and she had fallen hopelessly in love with Stu Redman, and it certainly was a tough old world. And now every time I see Harold I get such a case of the creeps. Even though he looks like he's lost ten pounds or so and he doesn't have quite so many pimples, I get the Her breath caught audibly in her throat and she sat up on her elbows, eyes wide in the dark. Something had moved inside her. Her hands went to the slight swelling of her middle. Surely it was too early. It had only been her imagination. Except Except it hadn't been. She lay back down slowly, her heart beating hard. She almost woke Stu up and then didn't. If only he had put the baby inside her, instead of Jess. If he had, she would have awakened him and shared the moment with him. The next baby she would. If there was a next baby, of course. And then the movement came again, so slight it might only have been gas. Except she knew better. It was the baby. And the baby was alive. "Oh glory," she murmured to herself, and lay back. Larry Underwood and Harold Lauder were forgotten. Everything that had happened to her since her mother had fallen ill was forgotten. She waited for it to move again, listening for that presence inside herself and fell asleep listening. Her baby was alive.

Harold sat in a chair on the lawn of the little house he had picked out for himself, looking up at the sky and thinking of an old rock and roll song. He hated rock, but he could remember this one almost line-for-line and even the name of the group that had sung it: Kathy Young and the Innocents. The lead singer, songstress, whatever, had a high, yearning, reedy voice that had somehow caught his full attention. A golden goody, the DJs called it. A Blast from the Past. A Platter that Matters. The girl singing lead sounded sixteen years old, pallid, blond, and plain. She sounded as if she might be singing to a picture that spent most of its time buried in a dresser drawer, a picture that was taken out only late at night when everyone else in the house was asleep. She sounded hopeless. The picture she sang to had perhaps been clipped from her big sister's yearbook,

318 a picture of the local Big Jock-captain of the football team and president of the Student Council. The Big Jock would be slipping it to the head cheerleader on some deserted lovers' lane while far away in suburbia this plain girl with no breasts and a pimple in the corner of her mouth sang: "A thousand stars in the sky... make me realize... you are the one love that I'll adore... tell me you love me.., tell me you're mine, all mine..." There were a lot more than a thousand stars in his sky tonight, but they weren't lovers' stars. No soft caul of Milky Way here. Here, a mile above sealevel they were as sharp and cruel as a billion holes in black velvet, stabs from God's icepick. They were haters' stars, and because they were, Harold felt well qualified to wish on them. Wish-I-may, wish-I-might, have-the-wish-I-wishtonight. Drop dead, folks. He sat silently with his head cocked back, a brooding astronomer. Harold's hair was longer than ever, but it was no longer dirty and clotted and tangled. He no longer smelled like a shootoff in a haymow. Even his blemishes were clearing up, now that he had laid off the candy. And with the hard work and all the walking, he was losing some weight. He was starting to look pretty good. There had been times in the last few weeks when he had strode past some reflective surface only to glance back over his shoulder, startled, as if he had caught a glimpse of a total stranger. He shifted in his chair. There was a book in his lap, a tall volume with a marbled blue binding and imitation leather covers. He kept it hidden under a loose hearthstone in the house when he was away. If anyone found the book, that would be the end of him in Boulder. There was one word stamped in gold leaf on the book's cover, and the word was LEDGER. It was the journal he had started after reading Fran's diary. Already he had filled the first sixty pages with his close, margin- to-margin handwriting. There were no paragraphs, only a solid block of writing, an outpouring of hate like pus from a skin abscess. He hadn't thought he had so much hate in him. It seemed he should have exhausted the flow by now, yet it seemed he had only tapped it. It was like that old joke. Why was the ground all white after Custer's Last Stand? Because the Indians kept coming and coming and... And why did he hate? He sat up straight, as if the question had come from the outside. It was a hard question to answer, except maybe to a few, a chosen few. Hadn't Einstein said there were only six people in the world who understood all the implications of E=mc2? What about the equation inside his own skull? The relativity of Harold. The speed of blight. Oh, he could fill twice as many pages as he had already written about that, becoming more obscure, more arcane, until he finally became lost in the clockwork of himself and still nowhere near the mainspring at all. He was perhaps... raping himself. Was that it? It was close, anyway. An obscene and ongoing act of buggery. The Indians just kept on coming and coming. He would be leaving Boulder soon. A month or two, no more. When he finally settled on a method of settling his scores. Then he would head out west. And when he got there he would open his mouth and spill his guts about this place. He would tell them what went on at the public meetings, and much more important, what went on at the private meetings. He was sure to be on the Free Zone Committee. He would be welcomed, and he would be well rewarded by the fellow in charge over there... not by an end to hate but by the perfect vehicle for it, a Hate Cadillac, a Fearderado, long and darkly shining. He would climb into it and it would bear him and his hate down on them. He and Flagg would kick this miserable settlement apart like an anthill. But first he would settle with Redman, who had lied to him and stolen his woman. Yes, Harold, but why do you hate? No; there was no satisfactory answer to that, only a kind of... of endorsement for the hate itself. Was it even a fair question? He thought not. You might as well ask a woman why she gave birth to a defective baby. There had been a time, an hour or an instant, when he had contemplated jettisoning the hate. That had been after he had finished reading Fran's diary and had discovered she was irrevocably committed to Stu Redman. That sudden knowledge had acted upon him the way a dash of cold water acts on a slug, causing it to contract into a tight little ball instead of a spread-out, loosely questing organism. In that hour or instant, he became aware that he could simply accept what was, and that knowledge had both exhilarated and terrified him. For that space of time he knew he could turn himself into a new person, a fresh Harold Lauder cloned from the old one by the sharp intervening knife of the superflu epidemic. He sensed, more clearly than any of the others, that that was what the Boulder Free Zone was all about. People were not the same as they had been. This small-town society was like no other in American pre-plague society. They didn't see it because they didn't stand outside the boundaries as he did. Men and women were living together with no apparent desire to reinstitute the ceremony of marriage. Whole groups of people were living together in small subcommunities like communes. There wasn't much fighting. People seemed to be getting along. And strangest of all, none of them seemed to be questioning the profound theological

319 implications of the dreams... and of the plague itself. Boulder itself was a cloned society, a tabula so rasa that it could not sense its own novel beauty. Harold sensed it, and hated it. Far away over the mountains was another cloned creature. A cutting from the dark malignancy, a single wild cell taken from the dying corpus of the old body politic, a lone representative of the carcinoma that had been eating the old society alive. One single cell, but it had already begun to reproduce itself and spawn other wild cells. For society it would be the old struggle, the effort of healthy tissue to reject the malignant incursion. But for each individual cell there was the old, old question, the one that went back to the Garden-did you eat the apple or leave it alone? Over there, in the West, they were already eating them a mess of apple pie and apple cobbler. The assassins of Eden were there, the dark fusiliers. And he himself, when faced with the knowledge that he was free to accept what was, had rejected the new opportunity. To seize it would have been to murder himself. The ghost of every humiliation he had ever suffered cried out against it. His murdered dreams and ambitions came back to eldritch life and asked if he could forget them so easily. In the new Free Zone society he could only be Harold Lauder. Over there he could be a prince. The malignancy drew him. It was a dark carnival-Ferris wheels with their lights out revolving above a black landscape, a never-ending sideshow filled with freaks like himself, and in the main tent the lions ate the spectators. What called to him was this discordant music of chaos. He opened his journal and by starlight wrote firmly:

August 12, 1990 (early morning). It it said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To embrace them, to vent them, is more noble; that is to say that the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure. HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

He closed the book. He went into the house, put the book in its hole in the hearth, and carefully replaced the hearthstone. He went into the bathroom, set his Coleman lamp on the sink so that it illuminated the mirror, and for the next fifteen minutes he practiced smiling. He was getting very good at it.