CHAPTER 62 Dayna Jurgens lay naked in the huge double bed, listening to the steady hiss of water coming

CHAPTER 62

Dayna Jurgens lay naked in the huge double bed, listening to the steady hiss of water coming from the shower, and looked up at her reflection in the big circular ceiling mirror, which was the exact shape and size of the bed it reflected. She thought that the female body always looks its best when it is flat on its back, stretched out, the tummy pulled flat, the breasts naturally upright without the vertical drag of gravity to pull them down. It was ninethirty in the morning, September 8. The Judge had been dead about eighteen hours, Bobby Terry considerably less—unfortunately for him. The shower ran on and on. There's a man with a cleanliness compulsion, she thought. I wonder what happened to him that makes him want to shower for half an hour at a stretch? Her mind turned back to the Judge. Who would have figured that? In its own way, it was a damned brilliant idea. Who would have suspected an old man? Well, Flagg had, it seemed. Somehow he had known when and approximately where. A picket line had been set up all the way along the Idaho-Oregon border, with orders to kill him. But the lob had been botched somehow. Since suppertime last night, the upper echelon here in Las Vegas had been walking around with pasty faces and downcast eyes. Whitney Horgan, who was one damned fine cook, had served something that looked like dog food and was too burned to taste like much of anything. The Judge was dead, but something had gone wrong. She got up and walked to the window and looked out over the desert. She saw two big Las Vegas High School buses trundling west on US 95 in the hot sunshine, headed out toward the Indian Springs airbase, where, she knew, a daily seminar in the art and craft of jet planes went on. There were over a dozen people in the West who knew how to fly, but by great good luck-for the Free Zone-none of them were checked out for the National Guard jets at Indian Springs. But they were learning. Oh my, yes. What was most important for her right now about the Judge's demise was that they had known when they had no business knowing. Was there a spy of their own back in the Free Zone? That was possible, she supposed; spying was a game two could play at. But Sue Stern had told her that the decision to send spies into the West had been strictly a committee thing, and she doubted very much if any of those seven were in the Flagg bag. Mother Abagail would have known if one of the committee had turned rotten, for one thing. Dayna was sure of it. That left a very unappetizing alternative. Flagg himself had just known. Dayna had been in Las Vegas eight days as of today, and as far as she could tell she was a fully accepted member of the community. She had already accumulated enough information about the operation over here to scare the living Jesus out of everyone back in Boulder. It would only take the news about the jet plane training program to do that. But the thing that frightened her the most personally was the way people turned away from you if you mentioned Flagg's name, the way they pretended they hadn't heard. Some of them would cross their fingers, or genuflect, or make the sign of the evil eye behind one cupped hand. He was the great There/Not-There. That was by day. By night, if you would just sit quietly by in the Cub Bar of the Grand or the Silver Slipper Room at The Cashbox, you heard stories about him, the beginning of myth. They talked slowly, haltingly, not looking at each other, drinking bottles of beer mostly. If you drank something stronger, you might lose control of your mouth, and that was dangerous. She knew that not all of what they said was the truth, but it was already impossible to separate the gilt embroidery from the whole cloth. She had heard he was a shape-changer, a werewolf, that he had started the plague himself, that he was the Antichrist whose coming was foretold in Revelation. She heard about the crucifixion of Hector Drogan, how he had just known Heck was freebasing... the way he had just known that the Judge was on the way, apparently. And he was never referred to as Flagg in these nightly discussions; it was as if they believed that to call him by name was to summon him like a djinn from a bottle. They called him the dark man. The Walkin Dude. The tall man. And Ratty Erwins called him Old Creeping Judas. If he had known about the Judge, didn't it stand to reason that he knew about her? The shower turned off. Keep it together, sweetie. He encourages the mumbo jumbo. It makes him look taller. It could be that he does have a spy in the Free Zone-it wouldn't necessarily have to be someone on the committee, just someone who told him Judge Farris wasn't the defector type. "You shouldn't walk around like that with no clothes on, sweetbuns. You'll get me horny all over again." She turned toward him, her smile rich and inviting, thinking that she would like to take him downstairs to the kitchen and stuff that thing he was so goddam proud of into Whitney Horgan's industrial meat-grinder. "Why do you think I was walking around with no clothes on?"

444 He looked at his watch. "Well, we got maybe forty minutes." His penis was already beginning to make twitching movements... like a divining rod, Dayna thought with sour amusement. "Well, come on then." He came toward her and she pointed at his chest. "And take that thing off. It gives me the creeps." Lloyd Henreid looked down at the amulet, dark teardrop marked with a single red flaw, and slipped it off. He put it on the night table and the fine-linked chain made a little hissing sound. "Better?" "All kinds of better." She held out her arms. A moment later he was on top of her. A moment after that he was thrusting into her. "You like that?" he panted. "You like the way that feels, sweetie?" "God, I love it," she moaned, thinking of the meatgrinder, all white enamel and gleaming steel. "What?" "I said I love it!" she screamed. She faked an orgasm shortly after that, tossing her hips wildly, crying out. He came seconds later (she had shared Lloyd's bed for four days now, and had his rhythms timed almost perfectly), and as she felt his semen beginning to run down her thigh, she happened to glance over at the night table. Black stone. Red flaw. It seemed to be staring at her. She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie. It sees me, she thought with hopeless horror in that defenseless moment before rationality reasserted itself. More: it sees THROUGH me.

Afterward, as she had hoped, Lloyd talked. That was part of his rhythm, too. He would put an arm around her bare shoulders, smoke a cigarette, look up at their reflections in the mirror over the bed, and tell her what was going on. "Glad I wasn't that Bobby Terry," he said. "No sir, no way. The main man wanted that old fart's head without so much as a bruise on it. Wanted to send it back over the Rockies. And look what happened. That numbnuts puts two . 45 slugs into his face. At close range. I guess he deserved what he got, but I'm glad I wasn't there." "What happened to him?" "Sweetbuns, don't ask." "How did he know? The big guy?" "He was there." She felt a chill. "Just happened to be there?" "Yeah. He just happens to be anywhere that there's trouble. Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to L. A. with..." "What did he do?" For a long time she didn't think he was going to answer. Usually she could gently push him in the direction she wanted him to go by asking a series of soft, respectful questions; making him feel as if he was (in the never-to-beforgotten words of her kid sister) King Shit of Turd Mountain. But this time she had a feeling she had pushed too far until Lloyd said in a funny, squeezed voice: "He just looked at him. Eric was laying down all this funky shit about how he wanted to see the Vegas operation run... we should do this, we should do that. Poor old Trash—he ain't all the way together himself, you know—was just staring at him like he was a TV actor or something. Eric's pacing back and forth like he's addressing a jury and like it was already proved he was going to get his own way. And he says—real soft—'Eric. ' Like that. And Eric looked at him. I didn't see nothing. But Eric just looked at him for a long time. Maybe five minutes. His eyes just got bigger and bigger... and then he started to drool... and then he started to giggle... and he giggled right along with Eric, and that scared me. When Flagg laughs, you get scared. But Eric just kept right on giggling, and then he said, `When you go back, drop him off in the Mojave. ' And that's what we did. And for all I know, Eric's wandering around out there right now. He looked at Eric for five minutes and drove him out of his mind." He took a large drag on his cigarette and crushed it out. Then he slung an arm around her. "Why are we talkin about bad shit like that?" "I don't know... how's it going out at Indian Springs?" Lloyd brightened. The Indian Springs project was his baby. "Good. Real good. We're going to have three guys checked out on the Skyhawk planes by the first of October, maybe sooner. Hank

445 Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he's a fucking genius. About some things he's not too bright, but when it comes to weapons, he's incredible." She had met Trashcan Man twice. Both times she had felt a chill slip over her when his strange, muddy eyes happened to light upon her, and a palpable sense of relief when those eyes passed on. It was obvious that many of the othersLloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man-saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck charm. One of his arms was a horrid mass of freshly healed burn tissue, and she remembered something peculiar that had happened two nights ago. Hank Rawson had been talking. He put a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match, and finished what he was saying before lighting the cigarette and shaking out the match. Dayna saw the way that Trashcan Man's eyes homed in on the match flame, the way his breathing seemed to stop. It was as if his whole being had focused on the tiny flame. It was like watching a starving man contemplate a nine-course dinner. Then Hank shook out the match and dropped the blackened stub into an ashtray. The moment had ended. "He's good with weapons?" she asked Lloyd. "He's great with them. The Skyhawks have under-wing missiles, air-to-ground. Shrikes. Weird how they name all that shit, isn't it? No one could figure out how the goddam things went on the planes. No one could figure out how to arm them or safety-control them. Christ, it took us most of one day to figure out how to get them off the storage racks. So Hank says, `We better get Trashy out here when he gets back and see if he can figure it out. '" "When he gets back?" "Yeah, he's a funny dude. He's been in Vegas almost a week now, but he'll be taking off again pretty quick." "Where does he go?" "Into the desert. He takes a Land-Rover and just goes. He's a strange guy, I tell you. In his way, Trash is almost as strange as the big guy himself. West of here there's nothing but empty desert and godforsaken waste. I ought to know. I did time way up west in a hellhole called Brownsville Station. I don't know how he lives out there, but he does. He looks for new toys, and he always comes back with a few. About a week after him and me got back from L. A., he brought back a pile of army machine guns with laser sightsnever-miss machine guns, Hank calls them. This time it was Teller mines, contact mines, fragment mines, and a canister of Parathion. He said he found a whole stockpile of Parathion. Also enough defoliant to turn the whole state of Colorado bald as an egg." "Where does he find it?" "Everywhere," Lloyd said simply. "He sniffs it out, sweetbuns. It isn't really so strange. Most of western Nevada and eastern California was owned by the good old U. S. A. It's where they tested their toys, all the way up to A-bombs. He'll be dragging one of those back someday." He laughed. Dayna felt cold, terribly cold. "The superflu started somewhere out here. I'd lay money on it. Maybe Trash will find it. I tell you, he just sniffs that stuff out. The big guy says just give him his head and let him run, and so that's what he does. You know what his favorite toy is right now?" "No," Dayna said. She wasn't sure she wanted to know... but why else had she come over here? "Flametracks." "What are flametrucks?" "Not trucks, tracks. He's got five of them out at Indian Springs, lined up like Formula One racecars." Lloyd laughed. "They used them in the Nam. The grunts called them Zippos. They're full of napalm. Trash loves em." "Neato," she muttered. "Anyway, when Trash came back this time, we took him out to the Springs. He hummed and muttered around those Shrikes and got them armed and mounted in about six hours. Can you believe that? They train Air Force technicians about ninety years to do stuff like that. But they're not Trash, you see. He's a fucking genius." Idiot savant, you mean. I bet I know how he got those burns, too. Lloyd looked at his watch and sat up. "Speaking of Indian Springs, I got to get out there. Just got time for another shower. You want to join me?" "Not this time." She got dressed after the shower began to run again. So far she had always managed to get dressed and undressed with him out of the room, and that was the way she intended to keep it. She strapped the clip to her forearm and slid the switchblade knife into its spring-loaded clasp. A quick twist of her wrist would deliver all ten inches of it into her hand. Well, she thought as she slipped into her blouse, a girl has to have some secrets.

During the afternoons, she was on a streetlamp maintenance crew. What the job amounted to was testing the bulbs with a simple gadget and replacing them if they had burned out, or if they had been broken by vandals when Las Vegas had been in the grip of the superflu. There were four of

446 them on the job, and they had a cherry-picker truck that trundled around from post to post and street to street. Late that afternoon, Dayna was up in the cherry-picker, removing the Plexiglas hood from one of the streetlamps and musing on how much she liked the people she was working with, particularly Jenny Engstrom, a tough and beautiful exnightclub dancer who was now running the cherry-picker's controls. She was the type of girl Dayna would have wanted for her best friend, and it confused her that Jenny was over here, on the dark man's side. It confused her so much that she didn't dare ask Jenny for an explanation. The others were also okay. She thought that Vegas had a rather larger proportion of stupids than the Zone, but none of them wore fangs, and they didn't turn into bats at moonrise. They were also people who worked much harder than she remembered the people in the Zone working. In the Free Zone you saw people idling in the parks at all hours of the day, and there were people who decided to break for lunch from noon until two. That sort of thing didn't happen over here. From H A. M. to 5 P. m., everybody was working, either at Indian Springs or on the maintenance crews here in town. And school had started again. There were about twenty kids in Vegas, ages ranging from four (that was Daniel McCarthy, the pet of everyone in town, known as Dinny) up to fifteen. They had found two people with teaching certificates, and classes went on five days a week. Lloyd, who had quit school after repeating his junior year for the third time, was very proud of the educational opportunities that were being provided. The pharmacies were open and unguarded. People came and went all the time... but they took away nothing heavier than a bottle of aspirin or Gelusil. There was no drug problem in the West. Anyone who had seen what had happened to Hector Drogan knew what the penalty for a habit was. There were no Rich Moffats, either. Everyone was friendly and straight. And it was wise to drink nothing stronger than bottled beer. Germany in 1938, she thought. The Nazis? Oh, they're charming people. Very athletic. They don't go to the nightclubs, the nightclubs are for the tourists. What do they do? They make clocks. Was it a fair comparison? Dayna wondered uneasily, thinking of Jenny Engstrom, who she liked so much. She didn't know... but she thought that maybe it was. She tested the bulb in the hood of the light standard. It was bad. She removed it, set it carefully between her feet, and got the last fresh one. Good, it was near the end of the day. It was— She glanced down and froze. People were coming back from the bus stop, headed home from Indian Springs. All of them were glancing up casually, the way a group of people always glance up at someone high in the air. The circus-for-free syndrome. That face, looking up at her. That wide, smiling, wondering face. Dear sweet Jesus in heaven, is that Tom Cullen? A dribble of salt-stinging sweat ran into her eye, doubling her vision. When she wiped it away, the face was gone. The people from the bus stop were halfway down the street, swinging their lunch buckets, talking and joking. Dayna gazed at the one she thought might be Tom, but from the rear it was so hard to tell— Tom? Would they send Tom? Surely not. That was so crazy it was almost— Almost sane. But she just couldn't believe it. "Hey, Jurgens!" Jenny called up brassily. "Did you fall asleep up there, or are you just playing with yourself?" Dayna . leaned over the cherry-picker's low railing and looked down at Jenny's upturned face. Gave her the finger. Jenny laughed. Dayna went back to her streetlamp bulb, struggling to snap it in, and by the time she had it right, it was time to knock off for the day. On the ride back to the garage, she was quiet and preoccupied... quiet enough for Jenny to comment on it. "Just got nothing to say, I guess," Dayna told her with a half-smile. It couldn't have been Tom. Could it?

447 Am I dreaming this? "Get the fuck dressed, you lying, spying bitch!" Okay, so it was no dream. She felt a sinking terror in her stomach that seemed almost preordained. They had known about the Judge, and now they knew about her. He had told them. She glanced at the clock on the night table. It was quarter of four in the morning. The Hour of the Secret Police, she thought. "Where is he?" she asked. "Around," Lloyd said grimly. His face was pale and shiny. His amulet lay in the open v of his shirt. "You'll wish he wasn't before long." "What." "I gave you VD, Lloyd. I hope it rots off." He kicked her just below the breastbone, knocking her on her back. "I-hope it rots off, Lloyd." "Shut up and get dressed." "Get out of here. I don't dress in front of any man." Lloyd kicked her again, this time in the bicep of her right arm. The pain was tremendous and her mouth drew down in a quivering bow but she didn't cry out. "You in a little hot water, Lloyd? Sleeping with Mata Hari?" She grinned at him with tears of pain standing in her eyes. "Come on, Lloyd," Whitney Horgan said. He saw murder in Lloyd's eyes and now stepped forward quickly and put a hand on Lloyd's arm. "We'll go in the living room. Jenny can watch her get dressed." "And what if she decides to jump out the window?" "She won't get the chance," Jenny said. Her broad face was dead blank, and for the first time Dayna noticed she was wearing a pistol on her hip. "She can't anyway," Ace High said. "The windows up here are just for show, didn't you know that? Sometimes big losers at the tables get wanting to take a high dive, and that would be bad publicity for the hotel. So they don't open." His eyes fell on Dayna, and they held a touch of compassion. Now you, babe, you're a real big loser." "Come on, Lloyd," Whitney said again. "You're going to do something you'll be sorry for later-kick her in the head or something-if you don't get out of here." "Okay." They went to the door together, and Lloyd looked back over his shoulder. "He's going to make it bad for you, you bitch." "You were the crappiest lover I ever had, Lloyd," she said sweetly. He tried to lunge back at her, but Whitney and Ken DeMott held him back and drew him through the doorway. The double doors closed with a low snicking sound. "Get dressed, Dayna," Jenny said. Dayna stood up, still rubbing the purpling bruise on her arm. "You people like that?" she asked. "Is that where you're at? People like Lloyd Henreid?" "You were the one sleeping with him, not me." Her face showed an emotion for the first time: angry reproach. "You think it's nice to come over here and spy on folks? You deserve everything you're going to get. And, sister, you're going to get a lot." "I was sleeping with him for a reason." She drew on her panties. "And I was spying for a reason." "Why don't you just shut up?" Dayna turned and looked at Jenny. "What do you think they're doing here, girl? Why do you think they're learning to fly those jets out at Indian Springs? Those Shrike missiles, do you think they're so Flagg can win his girl a Kewpie doll at the country fair?" Jenny pressed her lips tightly together. "That's none of my business." "Will it be none of your business if they use the jets to fly over the Rockies next spring and the missiles to wipe out everyone living there?" "I hope they do. It's us or you people; that's what he says. And I believe him." "They believed Hitler, too. But you don't believe him; you're just scared gutless of him." "Get dressed, Dayna." Dayna pulled on her slacks, buttoned them, zipped them. Then She put her hand to her mouth. "I... I think I'm going to throw up... God!..." Clutching her long-sleeved blouse in her hand, she turned and ran into the bathroom and locked the door. She made loud retching noises. "Open the door, Dayna! Open it or I'll shoot the lock out of it!" "Sick—" She made another loud retching noise. Standing on tiptoe, she felt along the top of the medicine cabinet, thanking God she had left the knife and its spring clip up here, praying for another twenty seconds She had the clip. She strapped it on. Now there were other voices in the bedroom. With her left hand she turned on the water in the basin. "Just a minute, I'm sick, dammit!"

448 But they weren't going to give her a minute. Someone dealt the bathroom door a kick and it shuddered in its frame. Dayna clicked the knife home. It lay along her forearm like a deadly arrow. Moving with desperate speed, she yanked the blouse on and buttoned the sleeves. Splashed water on her mouth. Flushed the toilet. Another kick dealt to the door. Dayna twisted the knob and they burst in, Lloyd looking wild- eyed, Jenny standing behind Ken DeMott and Ace High, her pistol drawn. "I puled," Dayna said coldly. "Too bad you couldn't watch it, huh?" Lloyd grabbed her by the shoulder and threw her out into the bedroom. "I ought to break your neck, you cunt." "Remember your master's voice." She buttoned the front of her blouse, sweeping them with her flashing eyes. "He's your dog-god, isn't that right? Kiss his ass and you belong to him." "You better just shut up," Whitney said gruffly. "You're only making it worse for yourself." She looked at Jenny, unable to understand how the openly smiling, bawdy daygirl could have changed into this blankfaced night-thing. "Don't you see that he's getting ready to start it all over again?" she asked them desperately. "The killing, the shooting... the plague?" "He's the biggest and the strongest," Whitney said with curious gentleness. "He's going to wipe you people off the face of the earth." "No more talk," Lloyd said. "Let's go." They moved to take her arms, but she stepped away, holding her arms across her body, and shook her head. "I'll walk," she said.

The casino was deserted except for a number of men with rifles, sitting or standing by the doors. They seemed to find interesting things to look at on the walls, the ceilings, and the bare gaming tables as the elevator doors opened and Lloyd's party stepped out, herding Dayna along. She was taken to the gate at the end of the rank of cashiers' windows. Lloyd opened it with a small key and they stepped through. She was herded quickly through an area that looked like a bank: there were adding machines, wastebaskets full of paper tapes, jars of rubber bands and paper clips. Computer screens, now gray and blank. Cash drawers ajar. Money had spilled out some of them and lay on the tile floors. Most of the bills were fifties and hundreds. At the rear of the cashiers' area, Whitney opened another door and Dayna was led down a carpeted hallway to an empty receptionist's office. Tastefully decorated. Free-form white desk for a tasteful secretary who had died, coughing and hacking up great green gobbets of phlegm, some months ago. A picture on the wall that looked like a Klee print. A mellow light-brown shag rug. The antechamber to the seat of power. Fear trickled into the hollows of her body like cold water, stiffening her up, making her feel awkward. Lloyd leaned over the desk and flicked the toggle switch there. Dayna saw that he was sweating lightly. "We have her, R. F." She felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her and was helpless to stop it-not that she cared. "R. F.! R. F! Oh, that's good! Ready when you are, C. B.!" She went off into a gale of giggles, and suddenly Jenny slapped her. "Shut up!" she hissed. "You don't know what you're in for." "I know," Dayna said, looking at her. "You and the rest, you're the ones who don't know." A voice came out of the intercom, warm and pleased and cheerful. "Very good, Lloyd, thanks. Send her in, please." "Alone?" "Yes indeed." There was an indulgent chuckle as the intercom cut off. Dayna felt her mouth dry up at the sound of it. Lloyd turned around. A lot of sweat now, standing out on his forehead in large drops and running down his thin cheeks like tears. "You heard him. Go on." She folded her arms below her breasts, keeping the knife turned inward. "Suppose I decline." "I'll drag you in." "Look at you, Lloyd. You're so scared you couldn't drag a mongrel puppy in there." She looked at the others. "You're all scared. Jenny, you're practically making in your pants. Not good for your complexion, dear. Or your pants." "Stop it, you filthy sneak," Jenny whispered. "I was never scared like that in the Free Zone," Dayna said. "I felt good over there. I came over here because I wanted that good feeling to stay on. It was nothing more political than that. You ought to think it over. Maybe he sells fear because he's got nothing else to sell." "Ma'am," Whitney said apologetically, "I'd sure like to listen to the rest of your sermon, but the man is waiting. I'm sorry, but you either got to say amen and go through that door on your own or I'll drag you. You can tell your tale to him once you get in there... if you can find enough spit to talk

449 with, that is. But until then, you're our responsibility." And the odd thing is, she thought, he sounds genuinely sorry. Too bad he's also so genuinely scared. "You won't have to do that." She forced her feet to get started, and then it was a little easier. She was going to her death; she was quite sure of that. If so, let it be so. She had the knife. For him first, if she could, and then for herself, if necessary. She thought: My name is Dayna Roberta Jurgens, and I am afraid, but I have been afraid before. All he can take from me is what I would have to give up someday anyhow-my life. I will not let him break me down. I will not let him make me less than I am, if I can possibly help it. I want to die well... and I am going to have what I want. She turned the knob and stepped through into the inner office... and into the presence of Randall Flagg. The room was large and mostly bare. The desk had been shoved up against the far wall, the executive swivel chair pinned behind it. The pictures were covered with dropcloths. The lights were off. Across the room, a drape had been pulled back to uncover a window-wall of glass that looked out on the desert. Dayna thought she had never seen such a sterile and uninviting vista in her life. Overhead was a moon like a small, highly polished silver coin. It was nearly full. Standing there, looking out, was the shape of a man. He continued to look out long after she had entered, indifferently presenting her his back, before he turned. How long does it take a man to turn around? Two, maybe three seconds at the most. But to Dayna it seemed that the dark man went on turning forever, showing more and more of himself, like the very moon he had been watching. She became a child again, struck dumb by the dreadful curiosity of great fear. For a moment she was caught entirely in the web of his attraction, his glamour, and she was sure that when the turn was completed, unknown eons from now, she would be staring into the face of her dreams: a Gothic cowled monk, his hood shaped around total darkness. A negative man with no face. She would see and then go mad. Then he was looking at her, walking forward, smiling warmly, and her first shocked thought was: Why, he's my age! Randy Flagg's hair was dark, tousled. His face was handsome and ruddy, as if he spent much time out in the desert wind. His features were mobile and sensitive, and his eyes danced with high glee, the eyes of a small child with a momentous and wonderful secret surprise. "Dayna!" he said. "Hi!" "H-H-Hello." She could say no more. She had thought she was prepared for anything, but she hadn't been prepared for this. Her mind had been knocked, reeling, to the mat. He was smiling at her confusion. Then he spread his hands, as if in apology. He was wearing a faded paisley shirt with a frayed collar, pegged jeans, and a very old pair of cowboy boots with rundown heels. "What did you expect? A vampire?" His smile broadened, almost demanding that she smile back. "A skin-turner? What have they been telling you about me?" "They're afraid," she said. "Lloyd was... sweating like a pig." His smile was still demanding an answering smile, and it took all her effort of will to deny him that. She had been kicked out of bed on his orders. Brought here to... what? Confess? Tell everything-she knew about the Free Zone? She couldn't believe there was that much he didn't already know. "Lloyd," Flagg said, and laughed ruefully. "Lloyd went through a rather bitter experience in Phoenix when the flu was raging. He doesn't like to talk about it. I rescued him from death and"-his smile grew even more disarming, if that was possible-"and from a fate worse than death is the popular idiom, I believe. He's associated me with that experience to a great degree, although his situation was not of my doing. Do you believe me?" She nodded slowly. She did believe him, and found herself wondering if Lloyd's constant showering had something to do with his "rather bitter experience in Phoenix." She also found herself feeling an emotion she never would have expected in connection with Lloyd Henreid: pity. "Good. Sit down, dear." She looked around doubtfully. "On the floor. The floor will be fine. We have to talk, and talk truth. Liars sit in chairs, so we'll eschew them. We'll sit as though we were friends on opposite sides of a campfire. Sit, girl." His eyes positively sparkled with suppressed mirth, and his sides seemed to bellow with laughter barely held in. He sat down and crossed his legs and then looked up at her appealingly, his expression seeming to say: You're not going to let me sit all alone on the floor of this ridiculous office, are you? After a moment's debate she did sit down. She crossed her legs and put her hands lightly on her knees. She could feel the comforting weight of the knife in its spring clip. "You were sent over here to spy out the land, dear," he said. "Is that an accurate description of the situation?" "Yes." There was no use denying it.

450 "And you know what usually befalls spies in time of war?" His smile broadened like sunshine. "Then isn't it lucky we're not at war, your people and mine?" She looked at him, totally surprised. "But we're not, you know," he said with quiet sincerity. "But... you..." A thousand confused thoughts spun in her head. Indian Springs. The Shrikes. Trashcan Man with his defoliant and his Zippos. The way the conversation always veered when this man's name-or presence—came into the conversation. And that lawyer, Eric Strellerton. Wandering in the Mojave with his brains burned out. All he did was look at him. "Have we attacked your Free Zone, so-called? Made any warlike move at all against you over there?" "No... but—" "And have you attacked us?" "Of course not!" "No. And we have no plans in that direction. Look!" He suddenly held up his right hand and curled it into a tube. Looking through it, she could see the desert beyond the window-wall. "The Great Western Desert!" he cried. "The Big Piss-All! Nevada! Arizona! New Mexico! California! A smattering of my people are in Washington, around the Seattle area, and in Portland, Oregon. A fistful each in Idaho and New Mexico. We're too scattered to even think about taking a census for a year or more. We're much more vulnerable than your Zone. The Free Zone is like a highly organized hive or commune. We are nothing but a confederacy, with me as the titular head. There's room for both of us. There will still be room for both of us in 2190. That's if the babies live, something we won't know about here for at least another five months. If they do, and humanity continues, let our grandfathers fight it out, if they have a bone to pick. Or their grandfathers. But what in God's name do we have to fight about?" "Nothing," she muttered. Her throat was dry. She felt dazed. And something else... was it hope? She was looking into his eyes. She could not seem to tear her gaze away, and she didn't want to. She wasn't going mad. He wasn't driving her mad at all. He was... a very reasonable man. "There are no economic reasons for us to fight, no technological ones either. Our politics are a bit different, but that is a very minor thing, with the Rockies between us..." He's hypnotizing me. With a huge effort she dragged her eyes away from his and looked out over his shoulder at the moon. Flagg's smile faded a bit, and a shadow of irritation seemed to cross his features. Or had she imagined it? When she looked back (more warily this time), he was smiling gently at her again. "You had the Judge killed," she said harshly. "You want something from me, and when you get it, you'll have me killed, too." He looked at her patiently. "There were pickets all along the Idaho-Oregon border, and they were looking for Judge Farris, that is true. But not to kill him! Their orders were to bring him to me. I was in Portland until yesterday. I wanted to talk to him as I'm now talking to you, dear: calmly, reasonably, and sanely. Two of my pickets spotted him in Copperfield, Oregon. He came out shooting, mortally wounding one of my men and killing the other outright. The wounded man killed the Judge before he himself died. I'm sorry about the way it came out. More sorry than you can know or understand." His eyes darkened, and about that she believed him... but probably not in the way he wanted her to believe him. And she felt that coldness again. "That's not the way they tell it here." "Believe them or believe me, dear. But remember I give them their orders." He was persuasive... goddamned persuasive. He seemed nearly harmless—but that wasn't exactly true, was it? That feeling only came from seeing that he was a man... or something that looked like a man. There was enough relief in just that to turn her into something like Silly Putty. He had a presence, and a politician's knack of knocking all your best arguments into a cocked hat... but he did it in a way she found very disturbing. "If you don't mean war, why the jets and all the other stuff you've got out at Indian Springs?" "Defensive measures," he said promptly. "We're doing similar things at Searles Lake in California, and at Edwards Air Force Base. There's another group at the atomic reactor on Yakima Ridge in Washington. Your folks will be doing the same thing... if they're not already." Dayna shook her head, very slowly. "When I left the Zone, they were still trying to get the electric lights working again." "And I'd be happy to send them two or three technicians, except I happen to know that your Brad Kitchner already has things going nicely. They had a brief outage yesterday, but he solved the problem very quickly. It was a power overload out on Arapahoe." "How do you know all that?"

451 "Oh, I have my ways," Flagg said genially. "The old woman came back, by the way. Sweet old woman." "Mother Abagail?" "Yes." His eyes were distant and murky; sad, perhaps. "She's dead. A pity. I really had hoped to meet her in person." "Dead? Mother Abagail is dead?" The murky look cleared, and he smiled at her. "Does that really surprise you so much?" "No, But it surprises me that she came back. And it surprises me even more that you know." "She came back to die." "Did she say anything?" For just a moment Flagg's mask of genial composure slipped, showing black and angry bafflement. "No," he said. "I thought she might... might speak. But she died in a coma." "Are you sure?" His smile reappeared, as radiant as the summer sun burning off ground-fog: "Never mind her, Dayna. Let's talk of more pleasant things, such as your return to the Zone. I'm sure you'd rather be there than here. I have something for you to take back." He reached into his shirt, removed a chamois bag, and took three service station maps from it. He handed them to Dayna, who looked at them with growing bewilderment. They showed the seven Western states. Certain areas were shaded in red. The hand-lettered key at the bottom of each map identified them as the areas where population had again begun to spring up. "You want me to take these?" "Yes. I know where your people are; I want you to know where mine are. As a gesture of good faith and friendship. And when you get back, I want you to tell them this: that Flagg means Them no harm, and Flagg's people mean them no harm. Tell them not to send any more spies. If they want to send people over here, have them call it a diplomatic mission... or exchange students... or any damn thing. But have them come openly. Will you tell them that?" She felt dazed, punchy. "Sure. I'll tell them. But—" "That's all." He lifted his open, empty palms again. She saw something and leaned forward, unsettled. "What are you looking at?" There was an edge in his voice. "Nothing." But she had seen, and she knew from the narrow expression on his face that he knew she had. There were no lines on Flagg's palms. They were as smooth and as blank as the skin on an infant's stomach. No lifeline, no loveline, no rings or bracelets or loops. Just... blank. They looked at each other for what seemed a very long time. Then Flagg bounced to his feet and went toward the desk. Dayna also rose. She had actually begun to believe that he might let her go. He sat on the edge of the desk and drew the intercom toward him. "I'll tell Lloyd to have the oil and the plugs and points changed on your cycle," he said. "I'll also tell him to have it gassed up. No more worries about gas or oil shortages now, hey? Plenty for all. Although there was a day-I remember it, and probably you do too, Dayna, when it seemed as if the whole world might go up in a series of nuclear fireballs over a lack of premium unleaded gasoline." He shook his head. "People were very, very stupid." He thumbed the button on the intercom. "Yeah, right here." "Will you have Dayna's bike gassed and tuned up and left in front of the hotel? She's going to be leaving us." Flagg clicked off. "Well, that's it, dear." "I can... just go?" "Yes, ma'am. It's been my pleasure." He lifted his hand to the door... palm side down. She went to the door. Her hand had barely brushed the knob when he said: "There is one more thing. One... very minor thing." Dayna turned to look at him. He was grinning at her, and it was a friendly grin, but for a flashing second she was reminded of a huge black mastiff, its tongue lolling over white spiked teeth that could rip off an arm as if it was a dishrag. "What's that?" "There's one more of your people over here," Flagg said. His smile widened. "Who might that be?" "How in the world would I know?" Dayna asked, and her mind flashed: Tom Cullen!... Could it really have been him? "Oh, come now, dear. I thought we had it all straightened out."

452 "Really," she said. "Look at it straight ahead and you'll see I'm being dead honest. The committee sent me... and the Judge... and who knows how many others... and they were very careful. Just so we couldn't tattle on each other if something... you know, happened." "If we decided to pull some fingernails?" "Okay, yes. I was approached by Sue Stern. I'd guess Larry Underwood... he's on the committee, too—" "I know who Mr. Underwood is." "Yes, well, I'd guess he asked the Judge. But as for anyone else..." She shook her head. "It could be anyone. Or anyones. For all I know each of the seven committee members was responsible for recruiting one spy." "Yes, that could be, but it isn't. There's only one, and you know who it is." His grin widened yet more, and now it began to frighten her. It was not a natural thing. It began to remind her of dead fish, polluted water, the surface of the moon seen through a telescope. It made her bladder feel loose and full of hot liquid. "You know," Flagg repeated. "No, I—" Flagg bent over the intercom again. "Has Lloyd left yet?" "No, I'm right here." Expensive intercom, good reproduction. Hold off a bit on Dayna's cycle," he said. "We still have a matter to"-he looked at her, and his eyes glimmered speculatively-"to thrash out in here," he finished. "Okay." The intercom clicked off. Flagg looked at her, smiling, hands folded. He looked for a very long time. Dayna began to sweat. His eyes seemed to grow larger and darker. Looking into them was like looking into wells which were very old and very deep. This time when she tried to drag her gaze away, she couldn't. "Tell me," he said, very softly. "Let's not have any unpleasantness, dear." From far off, she heard her voice say, "This whole thing was a script, wasn't it? A little one-act play." "Dear, I don't understand what you mean." "Yes, you do. The mistake was having Lloyd answer so fast. When you say frog around here, they jump. He should have been halfway down the Strip with my cycle. Except you told him to stay put because you never intended to let me go." "Dear, you've got a terrible case of unfounded paranoia. It was your experience with those men, I suspect. The ones with the traveling zoo. It must have been a terrible thing. This could be a terrible thing, too, and we don't want that, do we?" Her strength was draining away; it seemed to be flowing down her legs in perfect lines of force. With the last of her will, she turned her numb right hand into a fist and struck herself above the right eye. There was an airburst of pain inside her skull and her vision went wavery. Her head rocked back and struck the door with a hollow whack. Her gaze snapped away from his, and she felt her will returning. And her strength to resist. "Oh, you're good," she said raggedly. "You know who it is," he said. He got off the desk and began to walk toward her. "You know and you're going to tell me. Punching yourself in the head won't help, dear." "How come you don't know?" she cried at him. "You knew about the Judge and you knew about me! How come you don't know about—" His hands descended on her shoulders with terrible power, and they were cold, as cold as marble. "Who?" "I don't know." He shook her like a ragdoll, his face grinning and fierce and terrible. His hands were cold, but his face gave off the baking oven heat of the desert. "You know. Tell me. Who?" "Why don't you know?" "Because I can't see it!" he roared, and flung her across the room. She went in a boneless, rolling heap, and when she saw the searchlight of his face bearing down upon her in the gloom, her bladder let go, spreading warmth down her legs. The soft and helpful face of reason was gone. Randy Flagg was gone. She was with the Walkin Dude now, the tall man, the big guy, and God help her. "You'll tell," he said. "You'll tell me what I want to know." She gazed at him, and then slowly got to her feet. She felt the weight of the knife lying against her forearm. "Yes, I'll tell you," she said. "Come closer." He took a step toward her, grinning. "No, a lot closer. I want to whisper it in your ear."

453 He came closer still. She could feel baking heat, freezing cold. There was a high, atonal singing in her ears. She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar. "Closer," she whispered huskily. He took another step and she cocked her right wrist in viciously. She heard the spring click. Weight slapped into her hand. "Here!" she shrieked hysterically, and brought her arm up in a hard sweep, meaning to gut him, leaving him to blunder around the room with his intestines hanging out in steaming loops. Instead he roared laughter, hands on his hips, flaming face cocked back, squeezing and contorting with great good humor. "Oh, my dear!" he cried, and went off into another gale of laughter. She looked stupidly down at her hand. It held a firm yellow banana with a blue and white Chiquita sticker on it. She dropped it, horrified, to the carpet, where it became a sickly yellow grin, miming Flagg's own. "You'll tell," he whispered. "Oh yes indeed you will." And Dayna knew he was right. She whirled quickly, so quickly that even the dark man was momentarily caught by surprise. One of those black hands snatched out and caught only the back of her blouse, leaving him with nothing more substantial than a swatch of silk. Dayna leaped at the window-wall. "No!" he screamed, and she could feel him after her like a black wind. She drove with her lower legs, using them like pistons, hitting the window with the top of her head. There was a dull flat cracking sound, and she saw amazingly thick hunks of glass fall out into the employees' parking lot. Twisting cracks, like lodes of quicksilver, ran out from her point of impact. Momentum carried her halfway through the hole and it was there that she lodged, bleeding. She felt his hands on her shoulders and wondered how long it would take him to make her tell. An hour? Two? She suspected she was dying now, but that was not good enough. It was Tom I saw, and you can't feel him or whatever it is you do because he's different, he's He was dragging her back in. She killed herself by simply whipping her head viciously around to the right. A razor-sharp jag of glass plunged deep into her throat. Another slipped into her right eye. Her body went stiff for a moment, and her hands beat against the glass. Then she went limp. What the dark man dragged back into the office was only a bleeding sack. She had gone, perhaps in triumph. Bellowing his rage, Flagg kicked her. The yielding, indifferent movement of her body enraged him further. He began to kick her around the room, bellowing, snarling. Sparks began to jump from his hair, as if somewhere inside him a cyclotron had hummed into life, building up an electrical field and turning him into a battery. His eyes blazed with dark fire. He bellowed and kicked, kicked and bellowed. Outside, Lloyd and the others grew pale. They looked at each other. At last it was more than they could stand. Jenny, Ken, Whitney-they drifted away, and their curdled-milk faces were set in the careful expressions of people who hear nothing and want to go right on hearing it. Only Lloyd waited-not because he wanted to, but because he knew it was expected of him. And at last Flagg called him in.

He was sitting on the wide desk, his legs crossed, his hands on the knees of his jeans. He was looking over Lloyd's head, out into space. There was a draft, and Lloyd saw that the window-wall was smashed in the middle. The jagged edges of the hole were sticky with blood. Resting on the floor was a huddled, vaguely human form wrapped in a drape. "Get rid of that," Flagg said. "Okay." His voice fell to a husky whisper. "Should I take the head?" "Take the whole thing out to the east of town and douse it in gasoline and bum it. Do you hear me? Burn it! You burn the fucking thing!" "All right." "Yes." Flagg smiled benignly. Trembling, cotton-mouthed, nearly groaning with terror, Lloyd struggled to pick up the bulky object. The underside was sticky. It made a u in his arms, slithered through them, and thumped back to the floor. He threw a terrified glance at Flagg, but he was still in a semi-lotus, looking outward. Lloyd got hold of it again, clutched it, and staggered toward the door. He stopped and looked back. A little moan escaped him. Flagg was still in the semi-lotus, but now he was floating about ten inches above the desk, still looking serenely across the room. "W-W-What?"

454 "Do you still have the key I gave you in Phoenix?" "Keep it handy. The time is coming." "A-All right." He waited, but Flagg did not speak again. He hung in the darkness, a mindboggling Hindu fakir's trick, looking outward, smiling gently. Lloyd left quickly, happy as always just to go with his life and his sanity.

That day was a quiet one in Vegas. Lloyd arrived back around 2 P. m., smelling of gasoline. The wind had started to rise, and by five o'clock it was howling up and down the Strip and making forlorn hooting noises between the hotels. The palms, which had begun to die without city water in July and August, flapped against the sky like tattered battle flags. Clouds in strange shapes scudded overhead.

In the Cub Bar, Whitney Horgan and Ken DeMott sat drinking bottled beer and eating egg salad sandwiches. Three old ladies—the Weird Sisters, everyone called them—kept chickens on the outskirts of town, and no one could seem to get enough eggs. Below Whitney and Ken, in the casino, little Dinny McCarthy was crawling happily around on one of the crap tables with an array of plastic soldiers. "Lookit that little squirt," Ken said fondly. "Someone ast me if I'd watch him an hour. I'd watch him all week. I wish to God he was mine. My wife only had the one, and he was two months premature. Died in the incubator the third day out." He looked up as Lloyd came in. "Hey, Dinny!" Lloyd called. "Yoyd! Yoyd!" Dinny cried. He ran to the edge of the crap table, jumped down, and ran to him. Lloyd picked him up, swung him, and hugged him hard. "Got kisses for Lloyd?" he asked. Dinny smacked him with noisy kisses. "I got something for you," Lloyd said, and took a handful of foil-wrapped Hershey's Kisses from his breast pocket. Dinny crowed with delight and clutched them. "Yoyd?" "What, Dinny?" "Why do you smell like a gasoline pile?" Lloyd smiled. "I was burning some trash, honey. You go on and play. Who's your mom now?" "Angelina." He pronounced it Angeyeena. "Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too." "Don't tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd." Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd. In a minute or two he was back on the DON-r COME line of the crap table, generating his army with his mouth crammed full of chocolate. Whitney came over, wearing his white apron. He had two sandwiches for Lloyd and a cold bottle of Hamm's. "Thanks," Lloyd said. "Looks great." "That's homemade Syrian bread," Whitney said proudly. Lloyd munched for a while. "Has anybody seen him?" he asked at last. Ken shook his head. "I think he's gone again." Lloyd thought it over. Outside, a stronger-than-average gust of wind shrieked by, sounding lonely and lost in the desert. Dinny raised his head uneasily for a moment and then bent back to play. "I think he's around somewhere," Lloyd said finally. "I don't know why, but I do. I think he's around waiting for something to happen. I dunno what." Whitney said in a low voice, "You think he got it out of her?" "No," Lloyd said, watching Dinny. "I don't think he did. It went wrong for him somehow. She... she got lucky or she outthought him. And that doesn't happen often." "It won't matter in the long run," Ken said, but he looked troubled just the same. "No, it won't." Lloyd listened to the wind for a while. "Maybe he's gone back to L. A." But he didn't really think so, and his face showed it. Whitney went back to the kitchen and produced another round of beer. They drank in silence, thinking disquieting thoughts. First the Judge, now the woman. Both dead. And neither had talked. Neither had been unmarked as he had ordered. It was as if the old Yankees of Mantle and Maris and Ford had lost the opening two games of the World Series; it was hard for them to believe, and frightening. The wind blew hard all night.