CHAPTER 75 “I almost died, you know,” Nick said. He and Tom were walking up the empty sidewalk together.

CHAPTER 75

519 "And that almost killed you?" Nick pulled up his jeans and belted them. "It wasn't deep, but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection's the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the superflu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind." "Infection," Tom whispered, fascinated. They were walking again, almost floating along the sidewalk. "Tom, Stu's got an infection now." "No... no, don't say that, Nick... you're scaring Tom Cullen, laws, yes, you are!" "I know I am, Tom, and I'm sorry. But you have to know. He has pneumonia in both lungs. He's been sleeping outside for nearly two weeks. There are things you have to do for him. And still, he'll almost certainly die. You have to be prepared for that." "No, don't—" "Tom." Nick put his hand on Tom's shoulder, but Tom felt nothing... it was as if Nick's hand was nothing but smoke. "If he dies, you and Kojak have to go on. You have to get back to Boulder and tell them that you saw the hand of God in the desert. If it's God's will, Stu will go with you... in time. If it's God's will that Stu should die, then he will. Like me." "Nick," Tom begged. "Please—" "I showed you my leg for a reason. There are pills for infections. In places like this." Tom looked around and was surpised to see that they were no longer on the street. They were in a dark store. A drugstore. A wheelchair was suspended on piano wire from the ceiling like a ghostly mechanical corpse. A sign on Tom's right advertised: CONTINENCE SUPPLIES. "Yes, sir? May I help you?" Tom whirled around. Nick was behind the counter, in a white coat. "Nick?" "Yes, sir." Nick began to put small bottles of pills in front of Tom. "This is penicillin. Very good for pneumonia. This is ampicillin, and this one's amoxicillin. Also good stuff. And this is V-cillin, most commonly given to children, and it may work if the others don't. He's to drink lots of water, and he should have juices,, but that may not be possible. So give him these. They're vitamin C tablets. Also, he must be walked—" "I can't remember all of that!" Tom wailed. "I'm afraid you'll have to. Because there is no one else. You're on your own." Tom began to cry. Nick leaned forward. His arm swung. There was no slapagain there was only that feeling that Nick was smoke which had passed around him and possibly through him-but Tom felt his head rock back all the same. Something in his head seemed to snap. "Stop that! You can't be a baby now, Tom! Be a man! For God's sake, be a man!" Tom stared at Nick, his hand on his cheek, his eyes wide. "Walk him," Nick said. "Get him on his good leg. Drag him, if you have to. But get him off his back or he'll drown." "He isn't himself," Tom said. "He shouts... he shouts to people who aren't there." "He's delirious. Walk him anyway. All you can. Make him take the penicillin, one pill at a time. Give him aspirin. Keep him warm. Pray. Those are all the things you can do." "All right, Nick. All right, I'll try to be a man. I'll try to remember. But I wish you was here, laws, yes, I do!" "You do your best, Tom. That's all." Nick was gone. Tom woke up and found himself standing in the deserted drugstore by the prescription counter. Standing on the glass were four bottles of pills. Tom stared at them for a long time and then gathered them up.

Tom came back at four in the morning, his shoulders frosted with sleet. Outside, it was letting up, and there was a thin clean line of dawn in the east. Kojak barked an ecstatic welcome, and Stu moaned and woke up. Tom knelt beside him. "Stu?" "Tom? Hard to breathe." "I've got medicine, Stu. Nick showed me. You take it and get rid of that infection. You have to take one right now." From the bag he had brought in, Tom produced the four bottles of pills and a tall bottle of Gatorade. Nick had been wrong about the juice. There was plenty of bottled juice in the Green River Superette. Stu looked at the pills, holding them closely to his eyes. "Tom, where did you get these?" "In the drugstore. Nick gave them to me." "No, really." "Really! Really! You have to take the penicillin first to see if that works. Which one says penicillin?"

520 "This one does... but Tom..." "No. You have to. Nick said so. And you have to walk." "I can't walk. I got a bust leg. And I'm sick." Stu's voice became sulky, petulant. It was a sickroom voice. "You have to. Or I'll drag you," Tom said. Stu lost his tenuous grip on reality. Tom put one of the penicillin capsules in his mouth; and Stu reflex-swallowed it with Gatorade to keep from choking. He began to cough wretchedly anyway, and Tom pounded him on the back as if he were burping a baby. Then he hauled Stu to his good foot by main force and began to drag him around the lobby, Kojak following them anxiously. "Please God," Tom said. "Please God, please God." Stu cried out: "I know where I can get her a washboard, Glen! That music store has em! I seen one in the window!" "Please God," Tom panted. Stu's head lolled on his shoulder. It felt as hot as a furnace. His splinted leg dragged uselessly. Boulder had never seemed so far away as it did on that dismal morning.

Stu's struggle with pneumonia lasted two weeks. He drank quarts of Gatorade, V-8, Welch's grape juice, and various brands of orange drink. He rarely knew what he was drinking. His urine was strong and acidic. He messed himself like a baby, and like a baby's his stools were yellow and loose and totally blameless. Tom kept him clean. Tom dragged him around the lobby of the Utah Hotel. And Tom waited for the night when he would wake, not because Stu was raving in his sleep, but because his labored breathing had finally ceased. The penicillin produced an ugly red rash after two days, and Tom switched to the ampicillin. That was better. On October 7 Tom awoke in the morning to find Stu sleeping more deeply than he had in days'. His entire body was soaked with sweat, but his forehead was cool. The fever had snapped in the night. For the next two days, Stu did little but sleep. Tom had to struggle to wake him up enough to take his pills and sugar cubes from the restaurant attached to the Utah Hotel. He relapsed on October 11, and Tom was terribly afraid it was the end. But the fever did not go as high, and his respiration never got as thick and labored as it had been on those terrifying early mornings of the fifth and the sixth. On October 13 Tom awoke from a dazed nap in one of the lobby chairs to find Stu sitting up and looking around. "Tom," he whispered. "I'm alive." "Yes," Tom said joyfully. "Laws, yes!" "I'm hungry. Could you rustle up some soup, Tom? With noodles in it, maybe?" By the eighteenth his strength had begun to come back a little. He was able to get around the lobby for five minutes at a time on the crutches Tom brought him from the drugstore. There was a steady, maddening itch from his broken leg as the bones began to knit themselves together. On October 20 he went outside for the first time, bundled up in thermal underwear and a huge sheepskin coat. The day was warm and sunny, but with an undertone of coolness. In Boulder it might still be mid- fall, the aspens turning gold, but here winter was almost close enough to touch. He could see small patches of frozen, granulated snow in shadowed areas the sun never touched. "I don't know, Tom," he said. "I think we can get over to Grand Junction, but after that I just don't know. There's going to be a lot of snow in the mountains. And I don't dare move for a while, anyway. I've got to get my go back." "How long before your go comes back, Stu?" "I don't know, Tom. We'll just have to wait and see."

Stu was determined not to move too quickly, not to push it-he had been close enough to death to relish his recovery. He wanted it to be as complete as it could be. They moved out of the hotel lobby into a pair of connecting rooms down the first floor hall. The room across the way became Kojak's temporary doghouse. Stu's leg was indeed knitting, but because of the improper set, it was never going to be the same straight limb again, unless he got George Richardson to rebreak it and set it properly. When he got off the crutches, he was going to have a limp. Nonetheless, he set to work exercising it, trying to tone it up. Bringing the leg back to even 75 percent efficiency was going to be a long process, but so far as he could tell, he had a whole winter to do it in. On October 28 Green River was dusted with nearly five inches of snow. "If we don't make our move soon," Stu told Tom as they looked out at the snow, "we'll be spending the whole damn winter in the Utah Hotel." The next day they drove the Plymouth down to the gas station on the outskirts of town. Pausing often to rest and using Tom for the heavy work, they changed the balding back tires for a pair of studded snows. Stu considered taking a four-wheel drive, and had finally decided, quite irrationally,

521 that they should stick with their luck. Tom finished the operation by loading four fifty-pound bags of sand into the Plymouth's trunk. They left Green River on Halloween and headed east.

They reached Grand Junction at noon on November 2, with not much more than three hours to spare, as it turned out. The skies had been lead-gray all the forenoon, and as they turned down the main street, the first spits of snow began to skate across the Plymouth's hood. They had seen brief flurries half a dozen times en route, but this was not going to be a flurry. The sky promised serious snow. "Pick your spot;" Stu said. "We may be here for a while." Tom pointed. "There! The motel with the star on it!" The motel with the star on it was the Grand Junction Holiday Inn. Below the sign and the beckoning star was a marquee, and written on it in large red letters was: ELCOME TO GR ND JUNC ON'S SUMMERF ST '90! JUNE 12—JU Y 4TH! "Okay," Stu said. "Holiday Inn it is." He pulled in and killed the Plymouth's engine, and so far as either of them knew, it never ran again. By two that afternoon, the spits and spats of snow had developed into a thick white curtain that fell soundlessly and seemingly endlessly. By four o'clock the light wind had turned into a gale, driving the snow before it and piling up' drifts that grew with a speed which was almost hallucinatory. It snowed all night. When Stu and Tom got up the next morning, they found Kojak sitting in front of the big double doors in the lobby, looking out at a nearly moveless world of white. Nothing moved but a single bluejay that was strutting around on the crushed remnants of a summer awning across the street. "Jeezly crow," Tom whispered. "We're snowed in, ain't we, Stu?" Stu nodded. "How can we get back to Boulder in this?" "We wait for spring," Stu said. "That long?" Tom looked distressed, and Stu put an arm around the big manboy's shoulders. "The time will pass," he said, but even then he was not sure either of them would be able to wait that long.

Stu had been moaning and gasping in the darkness for some time. At last he gave a cry loud enough to wake himself up and came out of the dream to his Holiday Inn motel room up on his elbows, staring wide-eyed at nothing. He let out a long, shivery sigh and fumbled for the lamp by the bed table. He had clicked it twice before everything came back. It was funny, how hard that belief in electricity died. He found the Coleman lamp on the floor and lit that instead. When he had it going, he used the chamberpot. Then he sat down in the chair by the desk. He looked at his watch and saw it was quarter past three in the morning. The dream again. The Frannie dream. The nightmare. It was always the same. Frannie in pain, her face bathed in sweat. Richardson was between her legs, and Laurie Constable was standing nearby to assist him. Fran's feet were up in stainless steel- stirrups... Push, Frannie. Bear down. You're doing fine. But looking at George's somber eyes over the top of his mask, Stu knew that Frannie wasn't doing fine at all. Something was wrong. Laurie sponged off her sweaty face and pushed back her hair from her forehead. Breech birth. Who had said that? It was a sinister, bodiless voice, low and draggy, like a voice on a 45 rpm record played at 33 1/3. Breech birth. George's voice: You'd better call Dick. Tell him we may have to... Laurie's voice: Doctor, she's losing a lot of blood now... Stu lit a cigarette. It was terribly stale, but after that particular dream, anything was a comfort. It's an anxiety dream, that's all. You got this typical macho idea that things won't come right if you're not there. Well, bag it up, Stuart; she's fine. Not all dreams come true. But too many of them had come true during the last half-year. The feeling that he was being shown the future in this recurring dream of Fran's delivery would not leave him. He snubbed the cigarette out half-smoked and looked blankly into the gas lamp's steady glow. It was November 29; they had been quartered in the Grand Junction Holiday Inn for nearly four weeks. The time had passed slowly, but they had managed to keep amused with a whole town to plunder for diverting odds and ends. Stu had found a medium-sized Honda electrical generator in a supply house on Grand Avenue, and he and Tom had hauled it back to the Convention Hall across from the Holiday Inn by putting it

522 onto a sledge with a chainfall and then hooking up two Sno Cats to the sledge-moving it, in other words, in much the same way the Trashcan Man had moved his final gift for Randall Flagg. "What are we gonna do with it?" Tom asked. "Get the electricity going at the motel?" "This is too small for that," Stu said. "What, then? What's it for?" Tom was fairly dancing with impatience. "You'll see," Stu said. They put the generator in the Convention Hall's electrical closet, and Tom promptly forgot about it—which was just what Stu had hoped for. The next day he went to the Grand Junction Sixplex by snowmobile, and using the sledge and the chainfall himself this time, he had lowered an old thirtyfive-millimeter motion picture projector from the secondstory window of the storage area where he had found it on one of his exploring trips. It had been wrapped in plastic... and then simply forgotten, judging by the dust which had gathered on the protective covering. His leg was coming around nicely, but it had still taken him almost three hours to muscle the projector from the doorway of the Convention Hall into the center of the floor. He used three dollies and kept expecting Tom to happen by at any moment, looking for him. With Tom to pitch in, the work would have gone faster, but it also would have spoiled the surprise. But Tom was apparently off on business of his own, and Stu didn't see him all day. When he came into the Holiday Inn around five, apple-cheeked and wrapped in a scarf, the surprise was all ready. Stu had brought back all six of the movies which had been playing in the Grand Junction Cinema complex. After supper that evening, Stu said casually: "Come on over to the,Convention Hall with me, Tom." "What for?" "You'll see." The Convention Hall faced the Holiday Inn across the snowy street. Stu handed Tom a box of popcorn at the doorway. "What's this for?" Tom asked. "Can't watch a movie without popcorn, you big dummy," Stu grinned. "MOVIE?" "Sure." Tom burst into the Convention Hall. Saw the big projector set up, completely threaded. Saw the big convention movie screen pulled down. Saw two folding chairs set up in the middle of the huge, empty floor. "Wow," he whispered, and his expression of naked wonder had been all Stu could have hoped for. "I did this three summers at the Starlite Drive-In over in Braintree," Stu said. "I hope I ain't forgot how to fix one of these bastards if the film breaks." "Wow," Tom said again. "We'll have to wait in between reels. I wasn't about to go back and grab a second one." Stu stepped through the welter of patch cords leading from the projector to the Honda generator in the electrical closet, and pulled the starter cord. The generator began to chug cheerfully along. Stu shut the door as far as it would go to mute the engine sound and killed the lights. And five minutes later they were sitting side by side, watching Sylvester Stallone kill hundreds of dope-dealers in Rambo IV. The Fire-Fight. Dolby sound blared out at them from the Convention Hall's sixteen speakers, sometimes so loud it was hard to hear the dialogue (what dialogue there was)... but they had both loved it. Now, thinking about that, Stu smiled. Someone who didn't know better would have called him dumb-he could have hooked a VCR up to a much smaller gennie and they could have watched hundreds of movies that way, probably right in the Holiday Inn. But movies on TV were not the same, never had been, to his way of thinking. And that wasn't really the point, either. The point was simply that they had time to kill... and some days it died goddamned hard. Anyway, one of the films had been a reissue of one of the last Disney cartoons, Oliver and Company, which had never been released on videotape. Tom watched it again and again, laughing like a child at the antics of Oliver and the Artful Dodger and Fagin, who, in the cartoon, lived on a barge in New York and slept in a stolen airline seat. In addition to the movie project, Stu had built over twenty models, including a Rolls-Royce that had 240 parts and had sold for sixty-five dollars before the superflu. Tom had built a strange but somehow compelling terrain-contoured landscape that covered nearly half the floorspace of the Holiday Inn's main function room; he had used papier-mache, plaster of paris, and various food colorings. He called it Moonbase Alpha. Yes, they had kept busy, but What you're thinking is crazy. He flexed his leg. It was in better shape than he ever would have hoped, partially thanks to the Holiday Inn's weight room and exercising machines. There was still considerable stiffness and some pain but he was able to limp around without the crutches. They could take it slow and easy. He was quite sure he could show Tom how to run one of the Arctic Cats that almost everyone around here

523 kept packed away in the back of their garages. Do twenty miles a day, pack shelter halves, big sleeping bags, plenty of those freeze-dried concentrates... Sure, and when the avalanche comes down on you up in Vail Pass, you and Tom can wave a pack of freeze-dried carrots at it and tell it to go away. It's crazy! Still... He crushed his smoke and turned off the gas lamp. But it was a long time before he slept.

Over breakfast he said, "Tom, how badly do you want to get back to Boulder?" "And see Fran? Dick? Sandy? Laws, I want to get back to Boulder worse than anything, Stu. You don't think they gave my little house away, do you?" "No, I'm sure they didn't. What I mean is, would it be worth it to you to take a chance?" Tom looked at him, puzzled. Stu was getting ready to try and explain further when Tom said: "Laws, everything's a chance, isn't it?" It was decided as simply as that. They left Grand Junction on the last day of November.

There was no need to teach Tom the fundamentals of snowmobiling. Stu found a monster machine in a Colorado Highway Department shed not a mile from the Holiday Inn. It had an oversized engine, a fairing to cut the worst of the wind, and most important of all, it had been modified to include a large open storage compartment. It had once no doubt held all manner of emergency gear. The compartment was big enough to take one good-sized dog comfortably. With the number of shops in town devoted to outdoor activities, they had no trouble at all in outfitting themselves for the trip, even though the superflu had struck at the beginning of summer. They took light shelter halves and heavy sleeping bags, a pair of cross-country skis each (although the thought of trying to teach Tom the fundamentals of crosscountry skiing made Stu's blood run cold), a big Coleman gas stove, lamps, gas bottles, extra batteries, concentrated foods, and a big Garand rifle with a scope. By two o'clock of that first day, Stu saw that his fear of being snowed in someplace and starving to death was groundless. The woods were fairly crawling with game; he had never seen anything like it in his life. Later that afternoon he shot a deer, his first deer since the ninth grade, when he had played hooky from school to go out hunting with his Uncle Dale. That deer had been a scrawny doe whose meat had been wild-tasting and rather bitter... from eating nettles, Uncle Dale said. This one was a buck, fine and heavy and broad-chested. But then, Stu thought as he gutted it with a big knife he had liberated from a Grand Junction sporting goods store, the winter had just started. Nature had her own way of dealing with overpopulation. Tom built a fire while Stu butchered the deer as best he could, getting the sleeves of his heavy coat stiff and tacky with blood. By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing "Ave Maria." The deer he had gotten with his Uncle Dale had gone to an old man named Schoey who lived in a shack just over the Braintree town line. He had skinned and dressed the deer for three dollars and ten pounds of deermeat. "I sure wish old man Schoey was here tonight," he said with a sigh. "Who?" Tom asked, coming out of a semidoze. "No one, Tom. Talking to myself." As it turned out, the venison was worth it. Sweet and delicious. After they had eaten their fill, Stu cooked about thirty pounds of extra meat and packed it away in one of the Highway Department snowmobile's smaller storage compartments the next morning. That first day they only made sixteen miles.

That night the dream changed. He was in the delivery room again. There was blood everywhere- the sleeves of the white coat he was wearing were stiff and tacky with it. The sheet covering Frannie was soaked through. And still she shrieked. It's coming, George panted. Its time has come round at last, Frannie, it's waiting to be born, so push! PUSH! And it came, it came in a final freshet of blood. George pulled the infant free, grasping the hips because it had come feet-first. Laurie began to scream. Stainless-steel instruments sprayed everywhere— Because it was a wolf with a furious grinning human face, his face, it was Flagg, his time come round again, he was not dead, not dead yet, he still walked the world, Frannie had given birth to Randall Flagg— Stu woke up, his harsh breathing loud in his ears. Had he screamed? Tom was still asleep, huddled so deeply in his sleeping bag that Stu could only see his cowlick. Kojak was curled at Stu's side. Everything was all right, it had only been a dream— And then a single howl rose in the night, climbing, ululating, a silver chime of desperate horror... the howl of a wolf, or perhaps the scream of a killer's ghost.

524 Kojak raised his head. Gooseflesh broke out on Stu's arms, thighs, groin. The howl didn't come again. Stu slept. In the morning they packed up and went. on. It was Tom who noticed and pointed out that the der guts were all gone. There was a flurry of tracks where they had been, and the bloodstain of Stu's kill faded to a dull pink on the snow... but that was all.

Five days of good weather brought them to Rifle. The next morning they awoke to a deepening blizzard. Stu said he thought they should wait it out here, and they put up in a local motel. Tom held the lobby doors open and Stu drove the snowmobile right inside. As he told Tom, it made a handy garage, although the snowmobile's heavy-duty tread had chewed up the lobby's deep-pile rug considerably.

It snowed for three days. When they awoke on the morning of December 10 and dug themselves out, the sun was shining brightly and the temperature had climbed into the mid-thirties. The snow was much deeper now, and it had gotten more difficult to read the twists and turns of I-70. But it wasn't keeping to the highway that worried Stu on that bright, warm, and sunny day. In the late afternoon, as the blue shadows began to lengthen, Stu throttled down and then killed the snowmobile's engine, his head cocked, his whole body seeming to listen. "What is it, Stu? What's—" Then Tom heard it, too. A low rumbling sound off to their left and up ahead. It swelled to a deep express-train roar and then faded. The afternoon was still again. "Stu?" Tom asked anxiously. "Don't worry," he said, and thought: I'll worry enough for both of us.

The warm temperatures held. By December 13 they were nearly to Shoshone, and still climbing toward the roof of the Rockies-for them the highest point they would reach before beginning to descend again would be Loveland Pass. Again and again they heard the low rumble of avalanches, sometimes far away, sometimes so close that there was nothing to do but look up and wait and hope those great shelves of white death would not blot out the sky. On the twelfth, one swept down and over a place where they had been only half an hour before, burying the snowmobile's track under tons of packed snow. Stu was increasingly afraid that the vibration caused by the sound of the snowmobile's engine would be what finally killed them, triggering a slide that would bury them forty feet deep before they even had time enough to realize what was happening. But now there was nothing to do but press on and hope for the best. Then the temperatures plunged again and the threat abated somewhat. There was another storm and they were stopped for two days. They dug out and went on... and at night the wolves howled. Sometimes they were far away, sometimes so close that they seemed right outside the shelter halves, bringing Kojak to his feet, growling low in his chest, as taut as a steel spring. But the temperatures remained low and the frequency of the avalanches diminished, although they had another near miss on the eighteenth. On December 22, outside the town of Avon, Stu ran the snowmobile off the highway embankment. At one moment they were running along at a steady ten miles an hour, safe and fine, spuming up clouds of snow behind them. Tom had just pointed out the small village below, silent as a 1980s stereopticon image with its single white church steeple and the undisturbed drifts up to the eaves of the houses. The next moment the cowling of the snowmobile began to tilt forward. "What the fuck—" Stu began, and that was all he had time for. The snowmobile canted farther forward. Stu throttled back, but it was too late. There was a peculiar sensation of weightlessness, the feeling you have when you have just left the diving board and the pull of gravity just matches the force of your upward spring. They were pitched off the machine head over heels. Stu lost sight of Tom and Kojak. Cold snow up his nose. When he openedhis mouth to shout, the snow went down his throat. Down the back of his coat. Tumbling. Falling. Finally coming to rest in a deep white quilt of snow. He fought his way up like a swimmer, gasping hot fire. His throat had been snowburned. "Tom!" he shouted, treading snow. Oddly enough, from this angle he could see the highway embankment very clearly, and where they had run off it, causing their own small avalanche as they did so. The rear end of the snowmobile jutted out of the snow about fifty feet farther down the steep gradient. It looked like an orange buoy. Strange how the water imagery persisted... and by the way, was Tom drowning? "Tom! Tommy!" Kojak popped up, looking as if he had been dusted from stem to stern with confectioners sugar, and breasted his way through the snow toward Stu. "Kojak!" Stu shouted. "Find Tom! Find Tom!"

525 Kojak barked and struggled to turn around. He headed toward a churned-up place in the snow and barked again. Struggling, falling, eating snow, Stu got to the place and felt around. One gloved hand snagged Tom's jacket and he gave a furious yank. Tom bobbed up, gasping and retching, and they both fell on top of the snow on their backs. Tom whooped and gasped. "My throat! It's all hot! Oh laws, lawsy me—" "It's the cold, Tom. It goes away." "I was choking—" "It's all right now, Tom. We're going to be okay." They lay on top of the snow, getting their wind back. Stu put his arm around Tom's shoulders to still the big fellow's trembling. A distance away, gaining volume and then diminishing, was the rumbling cold sound of another avalanche.

It took them the rest of the day to get the three quarters of a mile between the place where they had run off the road and the town of Avon. There was no question of salvaging the snowmobile or any of the supplies lashed to it; it was just too far down the grade. It would stay there until spring, at least-maybe forever, the way things were now. They got to town half an hour past dusk, too cold and winded to do anything but build a fire and find a halfway warm place to sleep. That night there were no dreams-only the blackness of utter exhaustion. In the morning, they set about the task of reoutfitting themselves. It was a tougher job in the small town of Avon than it had been in Grand Junction. Again Stu considered just stopping and wintering here-if he said it was the right thing to do, Tom would not question him, and they had had an explicit lesson in what happened to people who pressed their luck just yesterday. But in the end, he rejected the idea. The baby was due sometime in early January. He wanted to be there when it came. He wanted to see with his own eyes that it was all right. At the end of Avon's short main street they found a John Deere dealership, and in the garage behind the showroom they found two used Deere snowmobiles. Neither of them was quite as good as the big Highway Department machine Stu had driven off the road, but one of them had an extra- wide cleated driving tread, and he thought it would do. They found no concentrates and had to settle for canned goods instead. The latter half of the day was spent ransacking houses for camping gear, a job neither of them relished. The victims of the plague were everywhere, transformed into grotesquely decayed ice-cave exhibits. Near the end of the day they found most of what they needed in one place, a large rooming house just off the main drag. Before the superflu struck, it had apparently been filled with young people, the sort who came to Colorado to do all the things John Denver used to sing about. Tom, in fact, found a large green plastic garbage bag in the crawlspace under the stairs filled with a very potent version of "Rocky Mountain High." "What's this? Is it tobacco, Stu?" Stu grinned. "Well, I guess some people thought so. It's locoweed, Tom. Leave it where you found it." They loaded the snowmobile carefully, storing away the canned goods, tying down new sleeping bags and shelter halves. By then the first stars were coming out, and they decided to spend one more night in Avon. Driving slowly back over the crusting snow to the house where they had set up quarters, Stu had a quietly stunning thought: tomorrow would be Christmas Eve. It seemed impossible to believe that time could have gotten by so fast, but the proof was staring up at him from his calendar wristwatch. They had left Grand Junction over three weeks before. When they reached the house, Stu said: "You and Kojak go on in and get the fire going. I got a small errand to run." "What's that, Stu?" "Well, it's a surprise," Stu said. "Surprise? Am I going to find out?" "Yeah." "When?" Tom's eyes sparkled. "Couple of days." "Tom Cullen can't wait a couple of days for a surprise, laws, no:" "Tom Cullen will just have to," Stu said with a grin. "I'll be back in an hour. You just be ready to go." "Well... okay." It was more like an hour and a half before Stu had exactly what he wanted. Tom pestered him about the surprise for the next two or three hours. Stu kept mum, and by the time they turned in, Tom had forgotten all about it. As they lay in the dark, Stu said: "I bet by now you wish we'd stayed in Grand Junction, huh?"

526 "Laws, no," Tom answered sleepily. "I want to get back to my little house just as fast as I can. I just hope we don't run off the road and fall into the snow again. Tom Cullen almost choked!" "We'll just have to go slower and try harder," Stu said, not mentioning what would probably happen to them if it did happen again... and there was no shelter within walking distance. "When do you think we'll be there, Stu?" "It'll be a while yet, old hoss. But we're gettin there. And I think what we better do right now is get some sleep, don't you?" "I guess." Stu turned out the light. That night he dreamed that both Frannie and her terrible wolf-child had died in childbirth. He heard George Richardson saying from a great distance: It's the flu. No more babies because of the flu. Pregnancy is death because of the flu. A chicken in every pot and a wolf in every womb. Because of the flu. We're all done. Mankind is done. Because of the flu. And from somewhere nearer, closing in, came the dark man's howling laughter.

On Christmas Eve they began a run of good traveling that would last almost until the New Year. The surface of the snow had crusted up in the cold. The wind blew swirling clouds of ice-crystals over it to pile up in powdery herringbone dunes that the John Deere snowmobile cut through easily. They wore sunglasses to guard against snow blindness. They camped, that Christmas Eve, on top of the crust twenty-four miles east of Avon, not far from Silverthorne. They were in the throat of Loveland Pass now, the choked and buried Eisenhower Tunnel somewhere below and to the east of them. While they were waiting for dinner to warm up, Stu discovered an amazing thing. Idly using an axe to chop through the crust and his hand to dig out the loose powder beneath, he had discovered blue metal only an arm's length below where they sat. He almost called Tom's attention to his find, and then thought better of it. The thought that they were sitting less than two feet above a traffic jam, less than two feet above God only knew how many dead bodies, was an unsettling one.

When Tom woke up on the morning of the twenty-fifth at quarter of seven, he found Stu already up and cooking breakfast, which was something of an oddity; Tom was almost always up before Stu. There was a pot of Campbell's vegetable soup hanging over the fire, just coming to a simmer. Kojak was watching it with great enthusiasm. "Morning, Stu," Tom said, zipping his jacket and crawling out of his sleeping bag and his shelter half. He had to whiz something terrible. "Morning," Stu answered casually. "And a merry Christmas." "Christmas?" Tom looked at him and forgot all about how badly he had to whiz. "Christmas?" he said again. "Christmas morning." He hooked a thumb to Tom's left. "Best I could do." Stuck into the snowcrust was a spruce-top about two feet high. It was decorated with a package of silver icicles Stu had found in the back room of the Avon Five-and-Ten. "A tree," Tom whispered, awed. "And presents. Those are presents, aren't they, Stu?" There were three packages on the snow under the tree, all of them wrapped in light blue tissue paper with silver wedding bells on it—there had been no Christmas paper at the five-and-ten, not even in the back room. "They're presents, all right," Stu said. "For you. From Santa Claus, I guess. Tom looked indignantly at Stu. "Tom Cullen knows there's no Santa Claus! Laws, no! They're from you!" He began to look distressed. "And I never got you one thing! I forgot .. I didn't know it was Christmas... I'm stupid! Stupid!" He balled up his fist and struck himself in the center of the forehead. He was on the verge of tears. Stu squatted on the snowcrust beside him. "Tom," he said. "You gave me my Christmas present early." "No, sir, I never did. I forgot. Tom Cullen's nothing but a dummy, M-O-O-N, that spells dummy." "But you did, you know. The best one of all. I'm still alive. I wouldn't be, if it wasn't for you." Tom looked at him uncomprehendingly. "If you hadn't come along when you did, I would have died in that washout west of Green River. And if it hadn't been for you, Tom, I would have died of pneumonia or the flu or whatever it was back there in the Utah Hotel. I don't know how you picked the right pills... if it was Nick or God of just plain old luck, but you did it. You got no sense, calling yourself a dummy. If it hadn't been for you, I never would have seen this Christmas. I'm in your debt." Tom said, "Aw, that ain't the same," but he was glowing with pleasure. "It is the same," Stu said seriously. "Well—"

527 "Go on, open your presents. See what he brung you. I heard his sleigh in the middle of the night for sure. Guess the flu didn't get up to the North Pole." "You heard him?" Tom was looking at Stu carefully, to see if he was being ribbed. "Heard something." Tom took the first package and unwrapped it carefully—a pinball machine encased in Lucite, a new gadget all the kids had been yelling for the Christmas before, complete with two-year coin batteries. Tom's eyes lit up when he saw it. "Turn it on," Stu said. "Naw, I want to see what else I got." There was a sweatshirt with a winded skier on it, resting on crooked skis and propping himself up with his ski poles. "It says: I CLIMBED LOVELAND PASS," Stu told him. "We haven't yet, but I guess we're gettin there." Tom promptly stripped off his parka, put the sweatshirt on, and then replaced his parka. "Great! Great, Stu!" The last package, the smallest, contained a simple silver medallion on a finelink silver chain. To Tom it looked like the number 8 lying on its side. He held it up in puzzlement and wonder. "What is it, Stu?" "It's a Greek symbol. I remember it from a long time ago, on a doctor program called `Ben Casey. ' It means infinity, Tom. Forever." He reached across to Tom and held the hand that held the medallion. "I think maybe we're going to get to Boulder, Tommy. I think we were meant to get there from the first. I'd like you to wear that, if you don't mind. And if you ever need a favor and wonder who to—ask, you look at that and remember Stuart Redman. All right?" "Infinity," Tom said, turning it over in his hand. "Forever." He slipped the medallion over his neck. "I'll remember that," he said. "Tom Cullen's gonna remember that." "Shit! I almost forgot!" Stu reached back into his shelter half and brought out another package. "Merry Christmas, Kojak! Just let me open this for you." He took off the wrappings and produced a box of Hartz Mountain Dog Yummies. He scattered a handful on the snow, and Kojak gobbled them up quickly. He came back. to Stu, wagging his tail hopefully. "More later," Stu told him, pocketing the box. "Make manners your watchword in everything you do, as old baldy would... would say." He heard his voice grow hoarse and felt tears sting his eyes. He suddenly missed Glen, missed Larry, missed Ralph with his cocked-back hat. Suddenly he missed them all, the ones who were gone, missed them terribly. Mother Abagail had said they would wade in blood before it was over, and she had been right. In his heart, Stu Redman cursed her and blessed her at the same time. "Stu? Are you okay?" "Yeah, Tommy, fine." He suddenly hugged Tom fiercely, and Tom hugged him back. "Merry Christmas, old hoss." Tom said hesitantly: "Can I sing a song-before we go?" "Sure, if you want." Stu rather expected "Jingle Bells" or "Frosty the Snowman" sung in the off-key and rather toneless voice of a child. But what came out was a fragment of "The First Noel," sung in a surprisingly pleasant tenor voice. "The first Noel," Tom's voice drifted across the white wastes, echoing back with faint sweetness, "the angels did say... was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay... In fields... as they... lay keeping their sheep... on a cold winter's night that was so deep .." Stu joined in on the chorus, his voice not as good as Tom's but mixing well enough to suit the two of them, and the old sweet hymn drifted back and forth in the deep cathedral silence of Christmas morning: "Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel... Christ is born in Israel..." "That's the only part of it I can remember," Tom said a little guiltily as their voices drifted away. "It was fine," Stu said. The tears were close again. It would not take much to set him off, and that would upset Tom. He swallowed them back. "We ought to get going. Daylight's wasting." "Sure." He looked at Stu, who was taking down his shelter half. "It's the best Christmas I ever had, Stu." "I'm glad, Tommy." And shortly after that they were under way again, traveling east and upward under the bright cold Christmas Day sun.

They camped near the summit of Loveland Pass that night, nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level. They slept three in a shelter as the temperature slipped down to twenty degrees below zero. The wind swept by endlessly, cold as the flat blade of a honed kitchen knife, and in the high

528 shadows of the rocks with the lunatic starsprawl of winter seeming almost close enough to touch, the wolves howled. The world seemed to be one gigantic crypt below them, both east and west. Early the next morning, before first light, Kojak woke them up with his barking. Stu crawled to the front of the, shelter half, his rifle in hand. For the first time the wolves were visible. They had come down from their places and sat in a rough ring around the camp, not howling now, only looking. Their eyes held deep green glints, and they all seemed to grin heartlessly. Stu fired six shots at random, scattering them. One of them leaped high and came down in a heap. Kojak trotted over to it, sniffed at it, then lifted his leg and urinated on it. "The wolves are still his," Tom said. "They always will be." Tom still seemed half asleep. His eyes were drugged and slow and dreamy. Stu suddenly realized what it was: Tom had fallen into that eerie state of hypnosis again. "Tom... is he dead? Do you know?" "He never dies," Tom said. "He's in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He's blind like them." "Will he be back?" Stu asked urgently. He felt cold all over. Tom didn't answer. "Tommy..." "Tom's sleeping. He went to see the elephant." "Tom, can you see Boulder?" Outside, a bitter white line of dawn was coming up in the sky against the jagged, sterile mountaintops. "Yes. They're waiting. Waiting for some word. Waiting for spring. Everything in Boulder is quiet." "Can you see Frannie?" Tom's face brightened. "Frannie, yes. She's fat. She's going to have a baby, I think. She stays with Lucy Swann. Lucy's going to have a baby, too. But Frannie will have her baby first. Except..." Tom's face grew dark. "Tom? Except what?" "The baby..." "What about the baby?" Tom looked around uncertainly. "We were shooting wolves, weren't we? Did I fall asleep, Stu?" Stu forced a smile. "A little bit, Tom." "I had a dream about an elephant. Funny, huh?" "Yeah." What about the baby? What about Fran? He began to suspect they weren't going to be in time; that whatever Tom had seen would happen before they could arrive.

The good weather broke three days before the New Year, and they stopped in the town of Kittredge. They were close enough to Boulder now for the delay to be a bitter disappointment to them both-even Kojak seemed uneasy and restless. "Can we push on soon, Stu?" Tom asked hopefully. "I don't know," Stu said. "I hope so. If we'd only gotten two more days of good weather, I believe that's all it would have taken. Damn!" He sighed, then shrugged. "Well, maybe it'll just be flurries." But it turned out to be the worst storm of the winter. It snowed for five days, piling up drifts that were twelve and even fourteen feet high in places. When they dug themselves out on the second of January to look at a sun as flat and small as a tarnished copper coin, all the landmarks were gone. Most of the town's small business district had been not just buried but entombed. Snowdrifts and snowdunes had been carved into wild, sinuous shapes by the wind. They might have been on another planet. They went on, but the traveling was slower than ever; finding the road had developed from a continuing nuisance into a serious problem. The snowmobile got stuck repeatedly and they had to dig it out. And on the second day of 1991, the freight-train rumble of the avalanches began again. On the fourth of January they came to the place where US 6 split off from the turnpike to go its own way to Golden, and although neither of them knew it— there were no dreams or premonitions— that was the day that Frannie Goldsmith went into labor. "Okay," Stu said as they paused at the turnoff. "No more trouble finding the road, anyhow. It's been blasted through solid rock. We were damned lucky just to find the turn-off, though." Staying on the road was easy enough, but getting through the tunnels was not. To find the entrances they had to dig through powdered snow in some cases and through the packed remains of old avalanches in others. The snowmobile roared and clashed unhappily over the bare road inside. Worse, it was scary in the tunnels—as either Larry or the Trashcan Man could have told them. They were black as minepits except for the cone of light thrown by the snowmobile's headlamp, because both ends were packed with snow. Being inside them was like being shut in a dark

529 refrigerator. Going was painfully slow, getting out of the far end of each tunnel was an exercise in engineering, and Stu was very much afraid that they would come upon a tunnel that was simply impassable no matter how much they grunted and heaved and shuffled the cars stuck inside from one place to another. If that happened, they would have to turn around and go back to the Interstate. They would lose a week at least. Abandoning the snowmobile was not an option; doing that would be a painful way of committing suicide. And Boulder was maddeningly close. On January seventh, about two hours after they had dug their way out of another tunnel, Tom stood up on the back of the snowmobile and pointed. "What's that, Stu?" Stu was tired and grumpy and out of sorts. The dreams had stopped coming, but perversely, that was somehow more frightening than having them. "Don't stand up while we're moving, Tom, how many times do I have to tell you that? You'll fall over backward and go headfirst into the snow and—" "Yeah, but what is it? It looks like a bridge. Did we get on a river someplace, Stu?" Stu looked, saw, throttled down, and stopped. "What is it?" Tom asked anxiously. "Overpass," Stu muttered. "I—I just don't believe it—" "Overpass? Overpass?" Stu turned around and grabbed Tom's shoulders. "It's the Golden overpass, Tom! That's 119 up there, Route 119! The Boulder road! We're only twenty miles from town! Maybe even less!" Tom understood at last. His mouth fell open, and the comical expression on his face made Stu laugh out loud and clap him on the back. Not even the steady dull ache in his leg could bother him now. "Are we really almost home, Stu?" "Yes, yes, yeeessss!"

Then they were grabbing each other, dancing around in a clumsy circle, falling down, sending up puffs of snow, powdering themselves with the' stuff. Kojak looked on, amazed... but after a few moments he began to jump around with them, barking and wagging his tail.

They camped that night in Golden, and pushed on up 119 toward Boulder early the next morning. Neither of them had slept very well the night before. Stu had never felt such anticipation in his life... and mixed with it was his steady nagging worry about Frannie and the baby. About an hour after noon, the snowmobile began to hitch and lug. Stu turned it off and got the spare gascan lashed to the side of Kojak's little cabin. "Oh Christ!" he said, feeling its deadly lightness. "What's the matter, Stu?" "Me! I'm the matter. I knew that friggin can was empty, and I forgot to fill it. Too damn excited, I guess. How's that for stupid?" "We're out of gas?" Stu flung the empty can away. "We sure-God are. How could I be that stupid?" "Thinking about Frannie, I guess. What do we do now, Stu?" "We walk, or try to. You'll want your sleeping bag. We'll split this canned stuff, put it in the sleeping bags. We'll leave the shelters behind. I'm sorry, Tom. My fault all the way." "That's all right, Stu. What about the shelters?" "Guess we better leave em, old hoss." They didn't get to Boulder that day; instead they camped at dusk, exhausted from wading through the powdery snow which seemed so light but had slowed them to a literal crawl. There was no fire that night. There was no wood handy, and they were all three too exhausted to dig for it. They were surrounded by high, rolling snowdunes. Even after dark there was no glow on the northern horizon, although Stu looked anxiously for it. They ate a cold supper and Tom disappeared into his sleeping bag and fell instantly asleep without even saying good night. Stu was tired, and his bad leg ached abominably. Be lucky if I haven't racked it up for good, he thought. But they would be in Boulder tomorrow night, sleeping in real beds—that was a promise. An unsettling thought occurred as he crawled into his sleeping bag. They would get to Boulder and Boulder would be empty—as empty as Grand Junction had been, and Avon, and Kittredge. Empty houses, empty stores, buildings with their roofs crashed in from the weight of the snow. Streets filled in with drifts. No sound but the drip of melting snow in one of the periodic thaws—he had read at the library that it was not unheard of for the temperature in Boulder to shoot suddenly up to seventy degrees in the heart of winter. But everyone would be gone, like people in a dream when you wake up. Because no one was left in the world but Stu Redman and Tom Cullen.

530 It was a crazy thought, but he couldn't shake it. He crawled out of his sleeping bag and looked north again, hoping for that faint lightening at the horizon that you can see when there is a community of people not too far distant in that direction. Surely he should be able to see something. He tried to remember how many people Glen had guessed would be in the Free Zone by the time the snow closed down travel. He couldn't pull the figure out. Eight thousand? Had that been it? Eight thousand people wasn't many; they wouldn't make much of a glow, even if all the juice was back on. Maybe— Maybe you ought to get y'self some sleep and forget all this nutty stuff. Let tomorrow take care of tomorrow. He lay down, and after a few more minutes of tossing and turning, brute exhaustion had its way. He slept. And dreamed he was in Boulder, a summertime Boulder where all the lawns were yellow and dead from the heat and lack of water. The only sound was an unlatched door banging back and forth in the light breeze. They had all left. Even Tom was gone. Frannie! he called, but his only answer was the wind and that sound of the door, banging slowly back and forth.

By two o'clock the next day, they had struggled along another few miles. They took turns breaking trail. Stu was beginning to believe that they would be on the road yet another day. He was the one that was slowing them down. His leg was beginning to seize up. Be crawling pretty soon, he thought. Tom had been doing most of the trail-breaking. When they paused for their cold canned lunch, it occurred to Stu that he had never even seen Frannie when she was really big. Might have that chance yet. But he didn't think he would. He had become more and more convinced that it had happened without him... for better or for worse. Now, an hour after they had finished lunch, he was still so full of his own thoughts that he almost walked into Tom, who had stopped. "What's the problem?" he asked, rubbing his leg. "The road," Tom said, and Stu came around to look in a hurry. After a long, wondering . pause, Stu said, "I'll be dipped in pitch." They were standing atop a snowbank nearly nine feet high. Crusted snow sloped steeply down to the bare road below, and to the right was a sign which read simply: BOULDER CITY LIMITS. Stu began to laugh. He sat down on the snow and roared, his face turned up to the sky, oblivious of Tom's puzzled look. At last he said, "They plowed the roads. Y'see? We made it, Tom! We made it! Kojak! Come here!" Stu spread the rest of the Dog Yummies on top of the snowbank and Kojak gobbled them while Stu smoked and Tom looked at the road that had appeared out of the miles of unmarked snow like a lunatic's mirage. "We're in Boulder again," Tom murmured softly. "We really are. C-I-T-Y-L-I-MI-T-S, that spells Boulder, laws, yes." Stu clapped him on the shoulder and tossed his cigarette away. "Come on, Tommy. Let's get our bad selves home."

Around four, it began to snow again. By 6 P. M. it was dark and the black tar of the road had become a ghostly white under their feet. Stu was limping badly now, almost lurching along. Tom asked him once if he wanted to rest, and Stu only shook his head. By eight, the snow had become thick and driving. Once or twice they lost their direction and blundered into the snowbanks beside the road before getting themselves reoriented. The going underfoot became slick. Tom fell twice and then, around quarter past eight, Stu fell on his bad leg. He had to clench his teeth against a groan. Tom rushed to help him get up. "I'm okay," Stu said, and managed to gain his feet. It was twenty minutes later when a young, nervous voice quavered out of the dark, freezing them to the spot: "W-Who g-goes there?" Kojak began to growl, his fur bushing up into hackles. Tom gasped. And just audible below the steady shriek of the wind, Stu heard a sound that caused terror to race through him: the snick of a rifle bolt being levered back. Sentries. They've posted sentries. Be funny to come all this way and get shot by a sentry outside the Table Mesa Shopping Center. Real funny. That's one even Randall Flagg could appreciate. "Stu Redman!" he yelled into the dark. "It's Stu Redman here!" He swallowed and heard an audible click in his throat. "Who's that over there?" Stupid. Won't be anyone that you know— But the voice that drifted out of the snow did sound familiar. "Stu? Stu Redman?" "Tom Cullen's with me... for Christ's sake, don't shoot us!" "Is it a trick?" The voice seemed to be deliberating with itself.

531 "No trick! Tom, say something." "Hi there," Tom said obediently. There was a pause. The snow blew and shrieked around them. Then the sentry (yes, that voice was familiar) called: "Stu had a picture on the wall in the old apartment. What was it?" Stu racked his brain frantically. The sound of the drawn rifle bolt kept recurring, getting in the way. He thought, My God, I'm standing here in a blizzard trying to think what picture was on the wall in the apartment-the old apartment, he said. Fran must have moved in with Lucy. Lucy used to make fun of that picture, used to say that John Wayne was waiting for those Indians just where you couldn't see him "Frederic Remington!" He bellowed at the top of his lungs. "It's called The Warpath!" "Stu!" the sentry yelled back. A black shape materialized out of the snow, slipping and sliding as it ran toward them. "I just can't believe it— Then he was in front of them, and Stu saw it was Billy Gehringer, who had caused them so much trouble with his hot-rodding last summer. "Stu! Tom! And Kojak, by Christ! Where's Glen Bateman and Larry? Where's Ralph?" Stu shook his head slowly. "Don't know. We got to get out of the cold, Billy. We're freezing." "Sure, the supermarket's right up the road. I'll call Norm Kellogg... Harry Dunbarton... Dick Ellis... shit, I'll wake the town! This is great! I don't believe it!" "Billy—" Billy turned back to them, and Stu limped over to where he stood. "Billy, Fran was going to have a baby—" Billy grew very still. And then he whispered, "Oh shit, I forgot about that." "She's had it?" "George. George Richardson can tell you, Stu. Or Dan Lathrop. He's our new doc, we got him about four weeks after you guys left, used to be a nose, throat, and ears man, but he's pretty g—" Stu gave Billy a brisk shake, cutting off his almost frantic babble. "What's wrong?" Tom asked. "Is something wrong with Frannie?" "Talk to me, Billy," Stu said. "Please." "Fran's okay," Billy said. "She's going to be fine." "That what you heard?" "No, I saw her. Me and Tony Donahue, we went up together with some flowers from the greenhouse. The greenhouse is Tony's project, he's got all kinds of stuff growing there, not just flowers. The only reason she's still in is because she had to have a what-do-you-call-it, a Roman birth—" "A cesarean section?" "Yeah, right, because the baby came the wrong way. But no sweat. We went to see her three days after she had the baby, it was January seventh we went up, two days ago. We brought her some roses. We figured she could use some cheering up because..." "The baby died?" Stu asked dully. "It's not dead," Billy said, and then he added with great reluctance: "Not yet." Stu suddenly felt far away, rushing through the void. He heard laughter... and the howling of wolves... Billy said in a miserable rush: "It's got the flu. It's got Captain Trips. It's the end for all of us, that's what people are saying. Frannie had him on the fourth, a boy, six pounds nine ounces, and at first he was okay and I guess everybody in the Zone got drunk, Dick Ellis said it was like V-E Day and V-J Day all rolled into one, and then on the sixth, he... he just got it. Yeah, man," Billy said, and his voice began to hitch and thicken. "He got it, oh shit, ain't that some welcome home, I'm so fuckin sorry, Stu..." Stu reached out, found Billy's shoulder, and pulled him closer. "At first everybody was sayin he might get better, maybe it's just the ordinary flu... or bronchitis... maybe the croup... but the docs, they said newborn babies almost never get those things. It's like a natural immunity, because they're so little. And both George and Dan... they saw so much of the superflu last year..." "That it would be hard for them to make a mistake," Stu finished for him. "Yeah," Billy whispered. "You got it." "What a bitch," Stu muttered. He turned away from Billy and began to limp down the road again. "Stu, where are you going?" "To the hospital," Stu said. "To see my woman."