CHAPTER 72 “You know,” Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning,

CHAPTER 72

Date Miles Total Miles September 6 28.1 28.1

487 September 7 27.0 55.1 September 8 26.5 81.6 September 9 28.2 109.8 September 10 27.9 137.7 September 11 29.1 166.8 September 12 28.8 195.6 September 13 29.5 225.1 September 14 32.0 257.1 September 15 32.6 289.7 September 16 35.5 325.2 September 17 37.2 362.4

Stu took a scrap of paper from his wallet and did some subtraction. "Well, we're makin better time than when we started out, but we've still got over four hundred miles to go. Shit, we ain't halfway yet." Larry nodded. "Better time is right. We're going downhill. And Glen's right, you know. Why do we want to hurry? Guy's just gonna wipe us out when we get over there." "You know, I just don't believe that," Ralph said. "We may die, sure, but it isn't going to be anything simple, anything cut and dried. Mother Abagail wouldn't send us off if we was to be just murdered and nothing more come of it. She just wouldn't." "I don't believe she, was the one who sent us," Stu said quietly. Larry's mileometer made four distinct little clicks as he set it for the day: 000. 0. Stu doused what remained of the campfire with dirt. The little rituals of the morning went on. They had been twelve days on the road. It seemed to Stu that the days would go on forever like this: Glen bitching goodnaturedly about the food, Larry noting their mileage on his dog-eared cheat sheet, the two cups of coffee, someone burying yesterday's scut, someone else burying the fire. It was routine, good routine. You forgot. what it was all leading to, and that was good. In the mornings Fran seemed very distant to him-very clear, but very distant, like a photograph kept in a locket. But in the evenings, when the dark had come and the moon sailed the night, she seemed very close. Almost close enough to touch... and that, of course, was where the ache lay. At times like those his faith in Mother Abagail turned to bitter doubt and he wanted to wake them all up and tell them it was a fool's errand, that they had taken up rubber lances to tilt at a lethal windmill, that they had better stop at the next town, get motorcycles, and go back. That they had better grab a little light and a little love while they still could-because a little was all Flagg was going to allow them. But that was at night. In the mornings it still seemed right to go on. He looked speculatively at Larry, and wondered if Larry thought about his Lucy late at night. Dreamed about her and wished... Glen came back into camp with Kojak at his heel, wincing a little as he walked. "Let's go get em,"—he said. "Right, Kojak?" Kojak wagged his tail. "He says Las Vegas or bust," Glen said. "Come on." They climbed the embankment to I-70, now descending toward Grand Junction, and began their day's walk.

Late that afternoon, a cold rain began to fall, chilling them all and damping conversation. Larry walked by himself, hands shoved in his pockets. At first he thought about Harold Lauder, whose corpse they had found two days ago-there seemed to be an unspoken conspiracy among them not to talk about Harold-but eventually his thoughts turned to the person he had dubbed the Wolfman. They had found the Wolfman just east of the Eisenhower Tunnel. The traffic was badly jammed up there, and the stink of death had been sickly potent. The Wolfman had been half in and half out of an Austin. He was wearing pegged jeans and a silk sequined Western shirt. The corpses of several wolves lay around the Austin. The Wolfman himself was half in and half out of the Austin's passenger seat, and a dead wolf lay on his chest. The Wolfman's hands were wrapped around the wolf's neck, and the wolfs bloody muzzle was angled up to the Wolfman's neck. Reconstructing, it seemed to all of them that a pack of wolves had come down out of the higher mountains, had spotted this lone man, and had attacked. The Wolfman had had a gun. He had dropped several of them before retreating to the Austin. How long before hunger had forced him from his refuge? Larry didn't know, didn't want to know. But he had seen how terribly thin the Wolfman had been. A week, maybe. He had been going west, whoever he was, going to join the dark man, but Larry would not have wished such a dreadful fate on anyone. He had spoken of it once to Stu, two days after they had emerged from the tunnel, with the Wolfman safely behind them. "Why would a bunch of wolves hang around so long, Stu?" "I don't know."

488 "I mean, if they wanted something to eat, couldn't they find it?" "I'd think so, yeah." It was a dreadful mystery to him, and he kept working it over in his mind, knowing he would never find the solution. Whoever the Wolfman had been, he hadn't been lacking in the balls department. Finally driven by hunger and thirst, he had opened the passenger door. One of the wolves had jumped him and torn his throat out. But the Wolfman had throttled it to death even as he himself died. The four of them had gone through the Eisenhower Tunnel roped together, and in that horrible blackness, Larry's mind had turned to the trip he had made through the Lincoln Tunnel. Only now it was not images of Rita Blakemoor that haunted him but the face of the Wolfman, frozen in its final snarl as he and the wolf had killed each other. Were the wolves sent to kill that man? But that thought was too unsettling to even consider. He tried to push the whole thing out of his mind and just keep walking, but that was a hard thing to do.

They made their camp that night beyond Loma, quite close to the Utah state line. Supper consisted of forage and boiled water, as all their meals did-they were following Mother Abagail's instructions to the letter: Go in the clothes that you stand up in. Carry nothing. "It's going to get bad in Utah," Ralph remarked. "I guess that's where we're going to find out if God really is watchin over us. There's one stretch, better than a hundred miles, without a town or even a gas station and a cafe. '' He didn't seem particularly disturbed by the prospect. "Water?" Stu asked. Ralph shrugged. "Not much of that, either. Guess I'll turn in." Larry followed suit. Glen stayed up to smoke z pipe. Stu had a few cigarettes and decided to have one. They smoked in silence for a while. "Long way from New Hampshire, baldy," Stu said at last. "It isn't exactly shouting distance from here to Texas." Stu smiled. "No. No, it ain't." "You miss Fran a lot, I guess." "Yeah. Miss her, worry about her. Worry about the baby. It's worse after it gets dark." Glen-puffed. "That's nothing you can change, Stuart." "I know. But I worry." "Sure." Glen knocked out his pipe on a rock. "Something funny happened last night, Stu. I've been trying to figure out all day if it was real, or a dream, or what." "What was it?" "Well, I woke up in the night and Kojak was growling at something. Must have been past midnight, because the fire had burned way down. Kojak was on the other side of it with his hackles standing up. I told him to shut up and he never even looked at me. He was looking over to my right. And I thought, What if it's wolves? Ever since we saw that guy Larry calls the Wolfman—" "Yeah, that was bad." "But there was nothing. I had a clear view. He was growling at nothing." "He had a scent, that's all." "Yeah, but the crazy part is still to come. After a couple of minutes I started to feel... well, decidedly weird. I felt like there was something right over by the turnpike embankment, and that it was watching me. Watching all of us. I felt like I could almost see it, that if I squinted my eyes the right way, I would see it. But I didn't want to. Because it felt like him. "It felt like Flagg, Stuart." "Probably nothing," Stu said after a moment. "It sure felt like something. It felt like something to Kojak, too." "Well, suppose he was watching somehow? What could we do about it?" "Nothing. But I don't like it. I don't like it that he's able to watch us... if that's what it is. It scares me shitless." Stu finished his cigarette, stubbed it out carefully on the side of a rock, but made no move toward his sleeping bag just yet. He looked at Kojak, who was lying by the campfire with his nose on his paws and watching them. "So Harold's dead," Stu said at last. "Yes." "And it was just a goddam waste. A waste of Sue and Nick. A waste of himself, too, I reckon." "I agree." There was nothing more to say. They had come upon Harold and his pitiful dying declaration the day after they had done the Eisenhower Tunnel. He and Nadine must have gone over Loveland Pass, because Harold still had his Triumph cyclethe remains of it, anyway-and as Ralph had said, it would have been impossible to get anything bigger than a kid's little red wagon through the Eisenhower.

489 The buzzards had worked him over pretty well, but Harold still clutched the Permacover notebook in one stiffening hand. The . 38 was jammed in his mouth like a grotesque lollipop, and although they hadn't buried Harold, Stu had removed the pistol. He had done it gently. Seeing how efficiently the dark man had destroyed Harold and how carelessly he had thrown him aside when his part was played out had made Stu hate Flagg all the more. It made him feel that they were throwing themselves away in a witless sort of children's crusade, and while he felt that they had to press on, Harold's corpse with the shattered leg haunted him the way the frozen grimace of the Wolfman haunted Larry. He had discovered he wanted to pay Flagg back for Harold as well as Nick and Susan... but he felt more and more sure that he would never get that chance. But you want to watch out, he thought grimly. You want to look out if I get within choking distance of you, you freak. Glen got up with a little wince. "I'm going to turn in, East Texas. Don't beg me to stay. It really is a dull party." "How's that arthritis?" Glen smiled and said, "Not too bad," but as he crossed to his—bedroll he was limping. Stu thought he should not have another cigarette-only smoking two or three a day would exhaust his supply by the end of the week-and then he lit one anyway. This evening it was not so cold, but for all that, there could be no doubt that in this high country, at least, summer was done. It made him feel sad, because he felt very strongly that he would never see another summer. When this one had begun, he had been an on-again, off-again worker at a factory that made pocket calculators. He had been living in a small town called Arnette, and he had spent a lot of his spare time hanging around Bill Hapscomb's Texaco station, listening to the other guys shoot the shit about the economy, the government, hard times. Stu guessed that none of them had known what real hard times were. He finished his cigarette and tossed it into the campfire. "Keep well, Frannie, old kid," he said, and got into his sleeping bag. And in his dreams he thought that Something had come near their camp, Something that was keeping malevolent watch over them. It might have been a wolf with human understanding. Or a crow. Or a weasel, creeping bellydown through the scrub. Or it might have been some disembodied presence, a watching Eye. I will fear no evil, he muttered in his dream. Yea, though I walk though the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. No evil. At last the dream faded and he slept soundly. The next morning they were on the road again early, Larry's gadget clicking off the miles as the highway switched lazily back and forth down the gentling Western Slope toward Utah. Shortly after noon they left Colorado behind them. That evening they camped west of Harley Dome, Utah. For the first time the great silence impressed then as being oppressive and malefic. Ralph Brentner went to sleep that night thinking: We're in the West now. We're out of our ballpark and into his. And that night Ralph dreamed of a wolf with a single red eye that had come out of the badlands to watch them. Go away, Ralph told it. Go away, we're not afraid. Not afraid of you.

By 2 P. m. on the afternoon of September 21, they were past Sego. The next large town, according to Stu's pocket map, was Green River. There were no more towns after that for a long, long time. Then, as Ralph had said, they would probably find out if God was with them or not. "Actually," Larry said to Glen, "I'm not as worried about food as I am water. Most everyone who's on a trip keeps a few munchies in their car, Oreos or Fig Newtons or something like that." Glen smiled. "Maybe the Lord will send us showers of blessing." Larry looked up at the cloudless blue sky and grimaced at the idea. "I sometimes think she was right off her block at the end of it." "Maybe she was," Glen said mildly. "If you read your theology, you'll find that God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane. It even seems to me—here's the closet Jesuit coming out—that there are good psychological reasons for it. A madman or a person on her deathbed is a human being with a drastically changed psyche. A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty prophet." "The ways of God," Larry said. "I know. We see through a glass darkly. It's a pretty dark glass to me, all right. Why we're walking all this way when we could have driven it in a week is beyond me. But since we're doing a nutty thing, I guess it's okay to do it in a nutty way." "What we're doing has all sorts of historical precedent," Glen said, "and I see some perfectly sound psychological and sociological reasons for this walk. I don't know if they're God's reasons or not, but they make good sense to me." "Such as what?" Stu and Ralph had walked over to hear this, too. "There were several American Indian tribes that used to make `having a vision' an integral part of their manhood rite. When it was your time to become a man, you were supposed to go out into

490 the wilderness unarmed. You were supposed to make a kill, and two songs-one about the Great Spirit and one about your own prowess as a hunter and a rider and a warrior and a fucker—and have that vision. You weren't supposed to eat. You were supposed to get up high—mentally as well as physically—and wait for that vision to come. And eventually, of course, it would." He chuckled. "Starvation is a great hallucinogenic." "You think Mother sent us out here to have visions?" Ralph asked. "Maybe to gain strength and holiness by a purging process," Glen said. "The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you're also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel." Larry shook his head slowly. "I don't follow that." "Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?" "Reads a book," Ralph said. "Goes to see his friends," Stu said. "Plays the stereo," Larry said, grinning. "Sure, all those things," Glen said. "But he's also missing that TV. There's a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he's still thinking, At nine o'clock I'm going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?" "Yeah," Ralph said. "Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn't feel right until it was back." "It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It's an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your selves, gentlemen-they are turning into a window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers." "But what's the point?" Ralph asked. "Why go through all the rigmarole?" Glen said, "If you read your Bible, you'll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time-Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means `no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while. ' Does that remind you of anyone?" "Sure. Mother," Ralph said. "Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted . electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too-a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you'd never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car." They were all listening closely. "Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner... all of it runs off the battery. A normal life-at least in what used to be Western civilization-was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?" "Yeah," Ralph said. "Even a big Delco won't ever overcharge when it's sitting in a Cadillac." "Well, what we've done is to strip off the accessories. We're on charge." Ralph said uneasily: "If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she'll explode." "Yes," Glen agreed. "Same with people. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn't say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here—". "Off my case, baldy," Stu growled. "Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infipity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity." They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over. "Are we changing?" Stu asked quietly. "Yes," Glen answered. "Yes, I think we are." "We've dropped some weight," Ralph said. "I know that just looking at you guys. And me, I used to have a helluva beergut. Now I can look down and see my toes again. In fact, I can see just about my whole feet." "It's a state of mind," Larry said suddenly. When they looked at him he seemed a trifle embarrassed but went on: "I've had this feeling for the last week or so, and I couldn't understand it. Maybe now I can. I've been feeling high. Like I'd done half a joint of really dynamite grass or

491 snorted just a touch of coke. But there's none of the disorienting feeling that goes with dope. You do some dope and you feel like normal thinking is lust a little bit out of your grasp. I feel like I'm thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high." Larry laughed. "Maybe it's just hunger." "Hunger's part of it," Glen agreed, "but not all of it." "Me, I'm hungry all the time," Ralph said, "but it doesn't seem too important. I feel good." "I do too," Stu said. "Physically, I haven't felt this good in years." "When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there," Glen said. "The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It's a whole-body, whole-mind enema." "You got such a fancy way of puttin things, baldy." "It may be inelegant, but it's accurate." Ralph asked, "Will it help us with him?" "Well," Glen said, "that's what it's for. I don't have much doubt about that. But we'll just have to wait and see, won't we?" They walked on. Kojak came out of the brush and walked with them for a while, his toenails clicking on the pavement of US 70. Larry reached down and ruffled his fur. "Ole Kojak," he said. "Did you know you were a battery? Just one great big old Delco battery with a lifetime guarantee?" Kojak didn't appear to know or care, but he wagged his tail to show he was on Larry's side.

They camped that night about fifteen miles west of Sego, and as if to drive home the point of what they had been talking about in the afternoon, there was nothing to eat for the first time since they had left Boulder. Glen had the last of their instant coffee in a Glad Bag, and they shared it out of a single mug, passing it from hand to hand. They had come the last ten miles without seeing a single car. The next morning, the twenty-second, they came upon an overturned Ford station wagon with four corpses in it-two of them little children. There were two boxes of animal crackers in the car, and a large bag of stale potato chips. The animal crackers were in better shape. They shared them out five ways. "Don't wolf them, Kojak," Glen admonished. "Bad dog! Where are your manners? And if you have no manners-as I must now conclude-where is your savoir faire?" Kojak thumped his tail and eyed the animal crackers in a way which showed pretty conclusively that he had no more savoir faire than he did manners. "Then root, hog, or die," Glen said, and gave the dog the last of his own share-x tiger. Kojak wolfed it down and then went sniffing off. Larry had saved his entire menagerie-about ten animals—to eat at once. He did so slowly and dreamily. "Did you ever notice," he said, "that animal crackers have a faint, lemony undertaste? I remember that from being a kid. Never noticed it again until now." Ralph had been tossing his last two crackers from hand to hand, and now he gobbled one. "Yeah, you're right. They do have sort of a lemon taste to em. You know, I kind of wish ole Nicky was here. I wouldn't mind sharing these old animal crackers a little further." Stu nodded. They finished the animal crackers and went on. That afternoon they found a Great Western Markets delivery truck, apparently bound for Green River, pulled neatly over in the breakdown lane, the driver sitting bolt upright and dead behind the wheel. They lunched on a canned ham from the back, but none of them seemed to want much. Glen said their stomachs had shrunk. Stu said the ham smelled bad to him-not spoiled, just too rich. Too meaty. It kind of turned his stomach. He could only bring himself to eat a single slice. Ralph said he would have just as soon had two or three more boxes of animal crackers, and they all laughed. Even Kojak ate only a small serving before going off to investigate some scent. They camped east of Green River that night, and there was a dust of snow in the early morning hours.

They came to the washout a little past noon on the twenty-third. The sky had been overcast all day, and it was cold—cold enough to snow, Stu thought—and not just flurries, either. The four of them stood on the edge, Kojak at Glen's heel, looking down and across. Somewhere north of here a dam might have given way, or there might have been a succession of hard summer rainstorms. Whatever, there had been a flash flood along the San Rafael, which was only a dry-wash in some years. It had swept away a great thirty-foot slab of I-70. The gully was about fifty feet deep, the banks crumbly, rubbly soil and sedimentary rock. At the bottom was a sullen trickle of water. "Holy crow," Ralph said. "Somebody oughtta call the Utah State Highway Department about this." Larry pointed. "Look over there," he said. They looked out into the emptiness, which was now beginning to be dotted with strange, wind-carved pillars and monoliths. About one hundred yards down the course of the San Rafael they saw a tangle of guardrails, cable, and large slabs of

492 asphaltcomposition paving. One chunk stuck up toward the cloudy, racing sky like an apocalyptic finger, complete with white broken passing line. Glen was looking down into the rubble-strewn cut, hands stuffed into his pockets, an absent, dreaming look on his face. In a low voice, Stu said: "Can you make it, Glen?" "Sure, I think so." "How's that arthritis?" "It's been worse." He cracked a smile. "But in all honesty, it's been better, too." They had no rope with which to anchor each other. Stu went down first, moving carefully. He didn't like the way the ground sometimes shifted under his feet, starting little slides of rock and dirt. Once he thought his footing was going to go out from under him completely, sending him sliding all the way to the bottom on his can. One groping hand caught a solid rock outcropping and he hung on for dear life, finding more solid ground for his feet. Then Kojak was bounding blithely past him, kicking up little puffs of dirt and sending down only small runnels of earth. A moment later he was standing on the bottom, wagging his tail and barking amiably up at Stu. "Fucking showoff dog," Stu growled, and carefully made his way to the bottom. "I'm coming next," Glen called. "I heard what you said about my dog!" "Be careful, baldy! Be damn careful! It's really loose underfoot." Glen came down slowly, moving with great deliberation from one hold to the next. Stu tensed every time he saw loose dirt start to slide out from underneath Glen's battered Georgia Giants. His hair blew like fine silver around his ears in the light breeze that had sprung up. It occurred to him that when he had first met Glen, painting a mediocre picture beside the road in New Hampshire, Glen's hair had still been salt-and-pepper. Until the moment Glen finally planted his feet on the level ground of the mudflat at the bottom of the gully, Stu was sure he was going to fall and break himself in two. Stu sighed with relief and clapped him on the shoulder. "No sweat, East Texas," Glen said, and bent to ruffle Kojak's fur. "Plenty here," Stu told him. Ralph came next, moving carefully from one hold to the next, lumping the last eight feet or so. "Boy," he said. "That shits just as loose as a goose. Be funny if we couldn't get up that other bank and had to walk four or five miles upstream to find shallower bank, wouldn't it?" "Be a lot funnier if another flash flood came along while we were looking," Stu said. Larry came down agilely and well, joining them less than three minutes after they had started down. "Who goes up first?" he asked. "Why don't you, since you're so perky?" Glen said. "Sure." " It took him considerably longer to get up, and twice the treacherous footing ran out beneath him and he nearly fell. But finally he gained the top and waved down at them. "Who's next?" Ralph asked. "Me," Glen said, and walked across to the other bank. Stu caught his arm. "Listen," he said. "We can walk upstream and find a shallower bank like Ralph said." "And lose the rest of the day? When I was a kid, I could have gone up there in forty seconds and registered a pulserate under seventy at the top." "You're no kid now, Glen." "No. But I think there's still some of him left." Before Stu could say more, Glen had started. He paused to rest about a third of the way up and then pressed on. Near the halfway point he grabbed an outcrop of shale that crumbled away under his hands and Stu was sure he was going to tumble all the way to the bottom, end over arthritic end. "Ah, shit—" Ralph breathed. Glen flailed his arms and somehow kept his balance. He jigged to his right and went up another twenty feet, rested, and then up again. Near the top a spur of rock that he had been standing on tore loose and he would have fallen, but Larry was there. He grabbed Glen's arm and hauled him up. "Nothing to it," Glen called down. Stu grinned with relief. "How's your pulse-rate, baldy?" "Plus ninety, I think," Glen admitted. Ralph climbed the cut-bank like a stolid mountain goat, checking each hold, shifting his hands and feet with great deliberation. When he reached the top, Stu started up. Right up until the moment he fell, Stu was thinking that actually this slope was a little easier than the one they had descended. The holds were better, the gradient a tiny bit shallower. But the surface was a mixture of chalky soil and rock fragments that had been badly loosened by the wet weather. Stu sensed that it wanted to be evil, and he went up carefully.

493 His chest was over the edge when the knob of outcropping his left foot was on suddenly disappeared. He felt himself begin to slide. Larry grabbed for his hand, but this time he missed his grip. Stu grabbed the outjutting edge of the turnpike, and it came off in his hands. He stared at it stupidly for a moment as the speed of his descent began to increase. He discarded it, feeling insanely like Wile E. Coyote. All I need, he thought, is for someone to go beep-beep before I hit the bottom. His knee struck something, and there was a sudden bolt of pain. He grabbed at the gluey surface of the slope, which was now speeding past him at an alarming rate, and kept coming away with nothing but handfuls of dirt. He slammed into a boulder sticking out of the rubble like a big blunt arrowhead and cartwheeled, the breath slapped from his body. He fell free for about ten feet, and came down on his lower leg at an angle. He heard it snap. The pain was instantaneous and huge. He yelled. He did a backward somersault. He was eating dirt now. Sharp pebbles scrawled bloody scratches across his face and arms. He came down on the hurt leg again, and felt it snap somewhere else. This time he didn't yell. This time he screamed. He slid the last fifteen feet on his belly, like a kid on a greasy chute-thechute. He came to rest with his pants full of mud and his heart beating crazily in his ears. The leg was white fire. His coat and the shirt beneath were both rucked up to his chin. Broken. But how bad? Pretty bad from the way it feels. Two places at least, maybe more. And the knee's sprung. Larry was coming down the slope, moving in little jumps that seemed almost a mockery of what had just happened to Stu. Then he was kneeling beside him, asking the question which Stu had already asked himself. "How bad, Stu?" Stu got up on his elbows and looked at Larry, his face white with shock and streaked brown with dirt. "I figure I'll be walking again in about three months," he said. He began to feel as if he were going to puke. He looked up at the cloudy sky, balled his fists up, and shook them at it. "OHHH, SHIT!" he screamed.

Ralph and Larry splinted the leg. Glen had produced a bottle of what he called "my arthritis pills" and gave Stu one. Stu didn't know what was in the "arthritis pills" and Glen refused to say, but the pain in his leg faded to a faraway drone. He felt very calm, even serene. It occurred to him that they were all living on borrowed time, not because they were on their way to find Flagg, necessarily, but because they had survived Captain Trips in the first place. At any rate, he knew what had to be done... and he was going to see that it was done. Larry had just finished speaking. They all looked at him anxiously to see what he would say. What he said was simple enough. "No." "Stu," Glen said gently, "you don't understand—" "I understand. I'm saying no. No trip back to Green River. No rope. No car. Against the rules of the game." "It's no fucking game!" Larry cried. "You'd die here!" "And you're almost surely gonna die over there in Nevada.. Now go on and get getting. You've got another four hours of daylight. No need to waste it." "We're not going to leave you," Larry said. "I'm sorry, but you are. I'm telling you to." "No. I'm in charge now. Mother said if anything happened to you—" "—that you were to go on." "No. No." Larry looked around at Glen and Ralph for support. They looked back at him, troubled. Kojak sat nearby, watching all four with his tail curled neatly around his paws. "Listen to me, Larry," Stu said. "This whole trip is based on the idea that the old lady knew what she was talking about. If you start frigging around with that, you're putting everything on the line." "Yeah, that's right," Ralph said. "No, it ain't right, you sodbuster," Larry said, furiously mimicking Ralph's flat Oklahoma accent. "It wasn't God's will that Stu fell down here, it wasn't even the dark man's doing. It was just loose dirt, that's all, just loose dirt! I'm not leaving you, Stu. I'm done leaving people behind." "Yes. We are going to leave him," Glen said quietly. Larry stared around unbelievingly, as if he had been betrayed. "I thought you were his friend!" "I am. But that doesn't matter." Larry uttered a hysterical laugh and walked a little way down the gully. "You're crazy! You know that?"

494 "No I'm not. We made an agreement. We stood around Mother Abagail's deathbed and entered into it. It almost certainly meant our deaths, and we knew it. We understood the agreement. Now we're going to live up to it." "Well, I want to, for Chrissake. I mean, it doesn't have to be Green River; we can get a station wagon, put him in the back, and go on—" "We're supposed to walk," Ralph said. He pointed at Stu. "He can't walk." "Right. Fine. He's got a broken leg. What do you propose we do? Shoot him like a horse?" "Larry—" Stu began.

Before he could go on, Glen grabbed Larry's shirt and yanked him toward him. "Who are you trying to save?" His voice was cold and stern. "Stu, or yourself?" Larry looked at him, mouth working. "It's very simple," Glen said. "We can't stay... and he can't go." "I refuse to accept that," Larry whispered. His face was dead pale. "It's a test," Ralph said suddenly. "That's what it is." "A sanity test, maybe," Larry said. "Vote," Stu said from the ground. "I vote you go on." "Me too," Ralph said. "Stu, I'm sorry. But if God's gonna watch out for us, maybe he'll watch out for you, too—" "I won't do it," Larry said. "It's not Stu you're thinking of," Glen said. "You're trying to save something in yourself, I think. But this time it's right to go on, Larry. We have to." Larry rubbed his mouth slowly with the back of his hand. "Let's stay here tonight," he said. "Let's think this thing out." "No," Stu said. Ralph nodded. A look passed between him and Glen, and then Glen fished the bottle of "arthritis pills" out of his pocket and put it in Stu's hand. "These have a morphine base," he said. "More than three or four would probably be fatal." His eyes locked with Stu's. "Do you understand, East Texas?" "Yeah. I get you." "What are you talking about?" Larry cried. "Just what the hell are you suggesting?" "Don't you know?" Ralph said with such utter contempt that for a moment Larry was silenced. Then it all rushed before him again with the nightmare speed of strangers' faces as you ride the whip at the carnival: pills, uppers, downers, cruisers. Rita. Turning her over in her sleeping bag and seeing that she was dead and stiff, green puke coming out of her mouth like a rancid party favor. "No!" he yelled, and tried to snatch the bottle from Stu's hand. Ralph grabbed him by the shoulders. Larry struggled. "Let him go," Stu said. "I want to talk to him." Ralph still held on, looking at Stu uncertainly. "No, go on, let him go. Ralph let go, but looked ready to spring again. Stu said, "Come here, Larry. Hunker down." Larry came over and hunkered by Stu. He looked miserably into Stu's face. "It's not right, man. When somebody falls down and breaks his leg, you don't... you can't just walk off and let that person die. Don't you know that? Hey, man..." He touched Stu's face. "Please. Think." Stu. took Larry's hand and held it. "Do you think I'm crazy?" "No! No, but—" "And do you think that people who are in their right minds have the right to decide for themselves what they want to do?" "Oh, man," Larry said, and started to cry. "Larry, you're not in this. I want you to go on. If you get out of Vegas, come back this way. Maybe God'll send a raven to feed me, you don't know. I read once in the funny-pages that a man can go seventy days without food, if he's got water." "It's going to be winter before that here. You'll be dead of exposure in three days, even if you don't use the pills." "That ain't up to you. You ain't in this part of it." "Don't send me away, Stu." Stu said grimly: "I'm sending you." "This sucks," Larry said, and got to his feet. "What's Fran going to say to us? When she finds out we left you for the gophers and the buzzards?" "She's not going to say anything if you don't get over there and fix his clock. Neither is Lucy. Or Dick Ellis. Or Brad. Or any of the others." Larry said, "Okay. We'll go. But tomorrow. We'll camp here tonight, and maybe we'll have a dream... something..."

495 "No dreams," Stu said gently. "No signs. It doesn't work like that. You'd stay one night and there'd be nothing and then you'd want to stay another night, and another night... you got to go right now." Larry walked away from them, head down, and stood with his back turned. "All right," he said at last in a voice almost too low to hear. "We'll do it your way. God help our souls." Ralph came over to-Stu and knelt down. "Can we get you anything, Stu?" Stu smiled. "Yeah. Everything Gore Vidal ever wrotethose books about Lincoln and Aaron Burr and those guys. I always meant to read the suckers. Now it looks like I got the chance." Ralph grinned crookedly. "Sorry, Stu. Looks like I'm tapped." Stu squeezed his arm, and Ralph went away. Glen came over. He had also been crying, and when he sat down by Stu, he started leaking again. "Come on, ya baby," Stu said. "I'll be okay." "Larry's right. This is bad. Like something you'd do to a horse." "You know it has to be done." "I guess I do, but who really knows? How's that leg?" "No pain at all, right now." "Okay, you got the pills." Glen swiped his arm across his eyes. "Goodbye, East Texas. It's been pretty goddam good to know you." Stu turned his head aside. "Don't say goodbye, Glen. Make it so long, it's better luck. You'll probably get halfway up that frigging bank and fall down here and we can spend the winter playing cribbage." "It's not so long," Glen said. "I feel that, don't you?" And because he did, Stu turned his face back to look at Glen. "Yeah, I do," he said, and then smiled a little. "But I will fear no evil, right?" "Right!" Glen said. His voice dropped to a husky whisper. "Pull the plug if you have to, Stuart. Don't screw around." "No." "Goodbye, then." "Goodbye, Glen." The three of them drew together on the west side of the gully, and after a look back over his shoulder, Glen started to go up. Stu followed his progress up the side with growing alarm. He was moving casually, almost carelessly; hardly even glancing at his footing. The ground crumbled away beneath him once, then twice. Both times he grabbed nonchalantly for a handhold, and both times one just happened to be there. When he reached the top, Stu released his pent-up breath in a long, harsh sigh. Ralph went next, and when he reached the top, Stu called Larry over one last time. He looked up into Larry's face and reflected that in its way it was remarkably like the late Harold Lauder's— remarkably still, the eyes watchful and a little wary. A face that gave away nothing but what it wanted to give away. "You're in charge now," Stu said. "Can you handle it?" "I don't know. I'll try." "You'll be making the decisions." "Will I? Looks like my first one was overruled." Now his eyes did give away an emotion: reproach. "Yeah, but that's the only one that will be. Listen—his men are going to grab you." "Yeah. I figure they will. They'll either grab us or shoot us from ambush like we were dogs." "No, I think they'll grab you and take you to him. It'll happen in the next few days, I think. When you get to Vegas, keep your eyes open. Wait. It'll come." "What, Stu? What'll come?" "I don't know. Whatever we were sent for. Be ready. Know it when it comes." "We'll be back for you, if we can. You know it." "Yeah, okay." Larry went up the bank quickly and joined the other two. They stood and waved down. Stu raised his hand in return. They left. And they never saw Stu Redman again.