CHAPTER 68
Oh, how history repeats itself: Trashcan Man was once again being broiled alive in the devils frying pan-but this time there was no hope of Cibola's cooling fountains to sustain him. It's what I deserve, no more than what I deserve. His skin had burned, peeled, burned, peeled again, and finally it had not tanned but blackened. He was walking proof that a man finally takes on the look of what he is. Trash looked as if someone had doused him in #2 kerosene and struck a match to him. The blue of his eyes had faded in the constant desert glare, and looking into them was like looking into weird, extra-dimensional holes in space. He was dressed in a strange imitation of the dark man-an openthroated red-checked shirt, faded jeans, and desert boots that were already scratched and mashed and folded and sprung. But he had thrown away his redflawed amulet. He didn't deserve to wear it. He had proved unworthy. And like all imperfect devils, he had been cast out. He paused in the broiling sun and passed a thin and shaking hand across his brow. He had been meant for this place and time-all his life had been preparation. He had passed through the burning corridors of hell to get here. He had endured the father-killing sheriff, he had endured that place at Terre Haute, he had endured Carley Yates. After all his strange and lonely life, he had found friends. Lloyd. Ken. Whitney Horgan. And ah God, he had fucked it all up. He deserved to bum out here in the devil's frying pan. Could there be redemption for him? The dark man might know. Trashcan did not. He could barely remember now what had happenedperhaps because his tortured mind did not want to remember. He had been in the desert for over a week before his last disastrous return to Indian Springs. A scorpion had stung him on the middle finger of his left hand (his fuckfinger, that long-ago Carley Yates in that long-ago Powtanville would have called it with unfailing pool-hall vulgarity), and that hand had swelled up like a rubber glove filled with water. An unearthly fire had filled his head. And yet he had pushed on. He had finally returned to Indian Springs, still feeling like a figment of someone else's imagination. There had been some good-natured talk as the men examined his findsincendiary fuses, contact land mines, small stuff, really. Trash had begun to feel good for the first time since the scorpion had stung him. And then, with no warning at all, time had sideslipped and he was back in Powtanville. Someone had said, "People who play with fire wet the bed, Trash," and he had looked up; expecting to see Billy Jamieson, but it hadn't been Bill, it was Rich Groudemore from Powtanville, grinning and picking his teeth with a match, his fingers black with grease because he'd strolled up to the pool-hall from the Texaco on the corner to have a game of nine-ball on his break. And someone else said, "You better put that away, Richie, Trash is back in town," and that sounded like Steve Tobin at first, but it wasn't Steve. It was Carley Yates in his old, scuffed, and hoody motorcycle jacket. With growing horror he had seen they were all there, unquiet corpses come back to life. Richie
479 Groudemore and Carley and Norm Morrisette and Hatch Cunningham, the one who was getting bald even though he was only eighteen and all of the others called him Hatch Cunnilingus. And they were leering at him. It came thick and fast then, through a feverhaze of years. Hey, Trash, why dintchoo torch the SCHOOL? Hey, Trashy, ya burned ya pork off yet? Hey, Trashcan Man, I heard you snort Ronson lighter fluid, that true? Then Carley Yates: Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check? He tried to scream at them, but all that had come out was a whisper: "Don't ask me about old lady Semple's pension check no more." And he ran. The rest of it was a dream. Getting the incendiary fuses and slapping them on the trucks in the motor pool. His hands had done their own work, his mind far away in a confused whirl. People had seen him coming and going between the motor pool and his sandtrack with its big balloon tires, and some of them had even waved, but no one had come over and asked what he was doing. After all, he wore Flagg's charm. Trashy did his work and thought about Terre Haute. In Terre Haute they had made him bite on a rubber thing when they gave him the shocks, and the man at the controls sometimes looked like the father-killing sheriff and sometimes like Carley Yates and sometimes like Hatch Cunnilingus. And he always swore hysterically to himself that this time he wouldn't piss himself. And he always did. When the trucks were fixed, he had gone into the nearest hangar and had fixed the choppers in there. He had wanted timer fuses to do that job right, and so he had gone into the messhall kitchen and had found over a dozen of those fiveanddime plastic timers. You set them for fifteen minutes or half an hour and when they got back to zero they went ding and you knew it was time to take your pie out of the oven. Only instead of going ding this time, Trash had thought, they are going to go bang. He liked that. That was pretty good. If Carley Yates or Rich Groudemore tried taking one of those copters up, they were going to get a big fat surprise. He had simply hooked the kitchen timers up to the copter ignition systems. When it was done, a moment of sanity had come back. A moment of choice. He had stared around wonderingly at the helicopters parked in the echoing hangar and then down at his hands. They smelled like a roll of burned caps. But this was not Powtanville. There were no helicopters in Powtanville. The Indiana sun did not shine with the savage brilliance of this sun. He was in Nevada. Carley and his pool-hall buddies were dead. Dead of the superflu. Trash had turned around and looked doubtfully at his handiwork. What was he doing, sabotaging the dark man's equipment? It was senseless, insane. He would undo it, and quickly. Oh, but the lovely explosions. The lovely fires. Flaming jet fuel streaming everywhere. Helicopters exploding out of the air. So beautiful. And he had suddenly thrown his new life away. He had trotted back to his sandcrawler, a furtive grin on his sunblackened face. He had gotten in and had driven away... but not too far away. He had waited, and finally a fuel truck had come out of the motor pool garage and had trundled across the tarmac like a large olive-drab beetle. And when it blew, exploding greasy fire in every direction, Trash had dropped his fleldglasses and had bellowed at the sky, shaking his fists in inarticulate joy. But the joy had not lasted long. It had been replaced by deadly terror and sick, mourning sorrow. He had driven northwest into the desert, pushing the sand-crawler along at near-suicidal speeds. How long ago? He didn't know. If he had been told that this was the sixteenth of September, he would only have nodded in a total blank lack of understanding. He thought he would kill himself, that there was nothing else left for him, every hand was turned against him now, and that was just as it was supposed to be. When you bit the hand that fed you, you expected that extended hand to curl into a fist. That wasn't only the way life went; that was justice. He had three large cans of gasoline in the back of the track. He would pour it all over himself and then strike a match. It was what he deserved. But he hadn't done it. He didn't know why. Some force, more powerful than the agony of his remorse and loneliness, had stopped him. It seemed that even burning himself to death like a Buddhist monk was not penance enough. He had slept. And when he awoke, he discovered that a new thought had crept into his brain as he slept, and that thought was: REDEMPTION. Was it possible? He didn't know. But if he found something... something big... and brought it to the dark man in Las Vegas, might it not be possible? And even if REDEMPTION was impossible, perhaps ATONEMENT was not. If it was true, there was still a chance he could die content. What? What could it be? What was big enough for REDEMPTION, or even for ATONEMENT? Not land mines or a fleet of flame-tracks, not grenades or automatic weapons. None of those things were big enough. He knew where there were two large experimental bombers (they had been built without congressional knowledge, paid for out of blind defense funds), but he could not get them
480 back to Vegas, and even if he could, there was no one there who could fly them. From the looks of them, they crewed at least ten, maybe more. He was like an infrared scope that senses heat in darkness and reveals those heat sources as vague red-devil shapes. He was able, in some strange way, to sense the things that had been left behind in this wasteland, where so many military projects had been carried out. He could have gone straight west, straight to Project Blue, where the whole thing had begun. But cold plague was not to his taste, and in his confused but not entirely illogical way, he thought it would not be to Flagg's taste, either. Plague didn't care who it killed. It might have been better for the human race if the original funders of Project Blue had kept that simple fact in mind. So he had gone northwest from Indian Springs, into the sandy desolation of the Nellis Air Force Range, stopping his crawler when he had to cut through high barbed wire fences marked with signs that read—U. S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING and ARMED SENTRIES and GUARD DOGS and THERE IS A HIGH-VOLTAGE CHARGE PASSING THROUGH THESE WIRES. But the electricity was dead, like the guard dogs and the armed sentries, and Trashcan Man drove on, correcting his course from time to time. He was being drawn, drawn to something. He didn't know what it was, but he thought it was big. Big enough. The crawler's Goodyear balloon tires rolled steadily on, carrying Trash through dry washes and up slopes so rocky that they looked like half-exposed stegosaurus spines. The air hung still and dry. The temperature hovered at just above 100. The only sound was the drone of the crawler's modified Studebaker engine. He topped a knoll, saw what was below, and threw the transmission into neutral for a moment to get a better look. There was a huddled complex of buildings down there, shimmering through the rising heat like quicksilver. Quonset huts and low cinderblock. Vehicles stalled here and there on dusty streets. The whole area was surrounded by three courses of barbed wire, and he could see the porcelain conductors along the wire. These were not the small conductors the size of a knuckle that passed along a weak stay-away charge; these were the giant ones, the size of a closed fist. From the east, a paved two-lane road led to a guardhouse that looked like a reinforced pillbox. No cute little signs here saying CHECK YOUR CAMERA WITH MP ON DUTY or IF YOU LIKED US, TELL YOUR CONGRESSMAN. The only sign in evidence was red on yellow, the colors of danger, curt and to the point: PRESENT IDENTIFICATION IMMEDIATELY. "Thank you," Trashcan whispered. He had no idea who he was thanking. "Oh thank you... thank you." His special sense had led him to this place, but he had known it was here all along. Somewhere. He put the sandtrack in its forward gear and lurched down the slope. Ten minutes later he was nosing up the access road to the guardhouse. There were black-and-white-striped crash barriers across the road, and Trash got out to examine them. Places like this had big generators to make sure there was plenty of emergency power. He doubted if any generator would have gone on supplying power for three months, but he would still have to be very careful and make sure everything was blown before going in. What he wanted was now very near at hand. He wouldn't allow himself to become overeager and get cooked like a roast in a microwave oven. Behind six inches of bulletproof glass, a mummy in an army uniform stared out and beyond him. Trash ducked under the crash barrier on the ingress side of the guardhouse and approached the door of the little concrete building. He tried it and it opened. That was good. When a place like this had to switch over to emergency power, everything was supposed to lock automatically. If you were taking a crap, you got locked in the bathroom until the crisis was over. But if the emergency power failed, everything unlocked again. The dead sentry had a dry, sweet, interesting smell, like cinnamon and sugar mixed together for toast. He had not bloated or rotted; he had simply dried up. There were still black discolorations under his neck, the distinctive trademark of Captain Trips. Standing in the corner behind him was a Browning automatic rifle. Trashcan Man took it and went back outside. He set the BAR for single fire, fiddled with the sight, and then socked it into the hollow of his scrawny right shoulder. He sighted down on one of the porcelain conductors and squeezed off a shot. There was a loud hand-clapping sound and an exciting whiff of cordite. The conductor exploded every whichway, but there was no purple-white glare of high-voltage electricity. Trashcan Man smiled. Humming, he walked over to the gate and examined it. Like the guardhouse door, it was unlocked. He pushed it open a little way and then hunkered down. There was a pressure mine here under the paving. He didn't know how he knew, but he did know. It might be armed; it might not be. He went back to the sandtrack, put it in gear, and drove it through the crash barriers. They broke off with a snapping, grinding sound and the crawler's big balloon tires rolled over them. The desert sun pounded down. Trashcan Man's peculiar eyes sparkled happily. In front of the gate, he got out
481 of the sandtrack and then put it in gear again. The driverless track rolled forward and pushed the gate all the way open. Trashcan Man darted into the guardhouse. He squinched his eyes shut, but there was no explosion. That was good; they really had shut down completely. Their emergency systems might have run a month, perhaps even two, but in the end the heat and lack of regular maintenance had killed them. Still, he would be careful. Meanwhile, his sandtrack was rolling serenely toward the corrugated wall of a long Quonset hut. Trashcan Man trotted onto the base after it and caught up with it just as it was bumping over the curb of what a sign announced was Illinois Street. He put it back into neutral, and the sandtrack stopped. He got in, reversed, and drove around to the front of the Quonset. It was a barracks. The shadowy interior was filled with that sugar-andcinnamon smell. There were perhaps twenty soldiers scattered among the fifty or so beds. Trashcan Man walked up the aisle between them, wondering where he was going. There was nothing in here for him, was there? These men had once been weapons of a sort, but they had been neutralized by the flu. But there was something at the very rear of the building that interested him. A sign. He walked up to read it. The heat in here was tremendous. It made his head thump and swell. But when he stood in front of the sign, he began to smile. Yes, it was here. Somewhere on this base was what he had been looking for. The sign showed a cartoon man in a cartoon shower. He was soaping his cartoon genitals busily; they were almost entirely covered with a drift of cartoon bubbles. The caption beneath read: REMEMBER! IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST TO SHOWER DAILY! Below that was a yellow-and-black emblem that showed three triangles pointed downward. The symbol for radiation. Trashcan Man laughed like a child and clapped his hands in the stillness.