"How long will it take you to get there?"

He shrugged. "Walking? I don't know. Glen's not young. Neither is Ralph, for that matter. If we can make thirty miles a day, we could do it by the first of October, I guess."

"And if there's early snow in the mountains? Or in Utah?"

He shrugged, looking at her steadily.

"More wine?" she asked.

"No. It gives me acid indigestion. It always did."

Fran poured herself another glass and drank it off.

"Was she God's voice, Stu? Was Was she?" she?"

"Frannie, I just don't know."

"We dreamed of her, and she was. This whole thing is part and parcel of some stupid game, do you know that, Stuart? Have you ever read the Book of Job?"

"I was never much on the Bible, I guess."

"My mom was. She thought it was very important that my brother Fred and I have a certain amount of religious background. She never said why. All the good it ever did me, so far as I know, was that I was always able to answer the Bible questions on 'Jeopardy.' Do you remember 'Jeopardy,' Stu?"

Smiling a little, he said: "And now here's your host, Alex Trebeck."

"That's the one. It was backward. They gave you the answer, you supplied the question. When it came to the Bible, I knew all the questions. Job was a bet between God and the Devil. The Devil said, 'Sure he worships You. He's got it soft. But if You piss in his face long enough, he'll renounce You.' So God took the wager. And God won." She smiled dully. "God always wins. God's a Boston Celtics fan, I bet."

"Maybe it is is a bet," Stu said, "but it's their lives, those folks down there. And the guy inside you. What did she call him? The chap?" a bet," Stu said, "but it's their lives, those folks down there. And the guy inside you. What did she call him? The chap?"

"She wouldn't even promise about him," Fran said. "If she could have done that ... just that ... it would have been at least a little bit easier to let you go."

Stu could think of nothing to say.

"Well, it's getting on toward noon now," Fran said. "Help me pack up, Stuart."

The half-eaten lunch went back into the hamper with the tablecloth and the rest of the wine. Stu looked at the spot and thought of how there were only a few crumbs to show where their picnic had been ... and the birds would get those soon enough. When he glanced up, Frannie was looking at him and crying. He went to her.

"It's all right. It's being pregnant. I'm always running at the eyes. I can't seem to help it."

"It's okay."

"Stu, make love to me."

"Here? Now?"

She nodded, then smiled a little. "It will be all right. If we watch out for the spiny things."

They spread the tablecloth again.

At the foot of Baseline Road she made him stop at what had been Ralph and Nick's house until four days ago. The entire rear of the house was blown away. The back yard was littered with debris. A shattered digital clock radio sat atop the shredded back hedge. Nearby was the sofa under which Frannie had been pinned. There was a patch of dried blood on the back steps. She looked at this fixedly.

"Is that Nick's blood?" she asked him. "Could it be?"

"Frannie, what's the point?" Stu asked uneasily.

"Is it?" it?"

"Jesus, I don't know. It could be, I suppose."

"Put your hand on it, Stu."

"Frannie, have you gone nuts?"

The frown-line creased her brow, the I-want line that he had first noticed back in New Hampshire.

"Put your hand on it!"

Reluctantly, Stu put his hand on the stain. He didn't know if it was Nick's blood or not (and believed, in fact, that it probably wasn't), but the gesture gave him a ghastly, crawly feeling.

"Now swear you'll come back."

The step seemed rather too warm here, and he wanted to take his hand away.

"Fran, how can I-"

"God can't run all of it!" she hissed at him. "Not all all of it. Swear, Stu, swear it!" of it. Swear, Stu, swear it!"

"Frannie, I swear to try."

"I guess that will have to be good enough, won't it?"

"We have to get down to Larry's."

"I know." But she held him more tightly still. "Say you love me."

"You know I do."

"I know, but say it. I want to hear it."

He took her by the shoulder. "Fran, I love you."

"Thank you," she said, and put her cheek against his shoulder. "Now I think I can say goodbye. I think I can let you go."

They held each other in the shattered back yard.

CHAPTER 60.

She and Lucy watched the undramatic start of their quest from the steps of Larry's house. The four of them stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, no packs, no bedrolls, no special equipment ... as per instructions. They had all changed into heavy walking shoes.

" 'Bye, Larry," Lucy said. Her face was shiny pale.

"Remember, Stuart," Fran said. "Remember what you swore".

"Yes. I'll remember."

Glen put his fingers into his mouth and whistled. Kojak, who had been investigating a sewer grating, came running.

"Let's go then," Larry said. His face was as pale as Lucy's, his eyes unusually bright, almost glittery. "Before I lose my nerve."

Stu blew a kiss through his closed fist, something he could not remember doing since the days when his mother saw him off on the school bus. Fran waved back. The tears were coming again, hot and burning, but she did not let them fall. They began. They simply walked away. They were halfway down the block now, and somewhere a bird sang. The midday sun was warm and undramatic. They reached the end of the block. Stu turned and waved again. Larry also waved. Fran and Lucy waved back. They crossed the street. They were gone. Lucy looked almost sick with loss and fear.

"Dear God," she said.

"Let's go in," Fran said. "I want tea."

They went inside. Fran put the teapot on. They began to wait.

The four of them moved slowly southwest during the afternoon, not talking much. They were headed toward Golden, where they would camp this first night. They passed the burial sites, three of them now, and around four o'clock, when their shadows had begun to trail out long behind them and the heat had begun to sneak out of the day, they came to the township marker spotted beside the road at the southern edge of Boulder. For a moment Stu had a feeling that all of them were on the verge of turning together and going back. Ahead of them was darkness and death. Behind them was a little warmth, a little love.

Glen took a bandanna out of his back pocket, whipped it into a blue paisley rope, and tied it around his head. " 'Chapter Forty-Three, The Bald-Headed Sociologist Dons His Sweat-Band,' " he said hollowly. Kojak was up ahead, over the line into Golden, nosing his way happily through a splash of wildflowers.

"Ah, man," Larry said, and his voice was almost a sob. "I feel like this is the end of everything."

"Yeah," Ralph said. "It do feel like that."

"Anybody want to take five?" Glen asked without much hope.

"Come on," Stu said, smiling a little. "Do you dogfaces want to live forever?"

They went on, leaving Boulder behind them. By nine that night they were camped in Golden, half a mile from where Route 6 begins its twisting, turning course along Clear Creek and into the stone heart of the Rockies.

None of them slept well that first night. Already they felt far from home, and under the shadow of death.

THE STAND.

SEPTEMBER 7, 1990JANUARY 10, 1991

This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York island, from the redwood forests, to the Gulf stream waters, this land was made for you and me.

-Woody Guthrie

"Hey, Trash, what did old lady Semple say when you torched her pension check?"

-Carley Yates

When the night has come And the land is dark And the moon is the only light we'll see, I won't be afraid Just as long as you stand by me.

-Ben E. King

CHAPTER 61.

The dark man had set his guardposts all along the eastern border of Oregon. The largest was at Ontario, where I-80 crosses over from Idaho; there were six men there, quartered in the trailer of a large Peterbilt truck. They had been there for more than a week, playing poker the whole time with twenties and fifties as useless as Monopoly money. One man was almost sixty thousand dollars ahead and another-a man whose working wage in the pre-plague world had been about ten thousand dollars a year-was over forty grand in the bucket.

It had rained almost the whole week, and tempers in the trailer were getting short. They had come out of Portland, and they wanted to get back there. There were women in Portland. Hung from a spike was a powerful two-way radio, broadcasting nothing but static. They were waiting for the radio to broadcast two simple words: Come home Come home. That would mean that the man they were looking for had been captured somewhere else.

The man they were looking for was approximately seventy years old, heavyset, balding. He wore glasses and he was driving a white-over-blue four-wheel drive, either a jeep or an International-Harvester. He was to be killed when he was finally spotted.

They were edgy and bored-the novelty of high-stakes poker for real money had worn off two days ago, even for the dullest of them-but not bored enough to just take off for Portland on their own. They had received their orders from the Walkin Dude himself, and even after rain-induced cabin fever had set in, their terror of him him remained. If they screwed the job up and he found out, God help them all. remained. If they screwed the job up and he found out, God help them all.

So they sat and played cards and watched by turns at the sight-slit which had been carved through the side of the trailer's steel wall. 1-80 was deserted in the dull, constant rain. But if the Scout happened along, it would be seen ... and stopped.

"He's a spy from the other side," the Walkin Dude had told them, that horrible grin wreathing his chops. Why it was so horrible none of them could have said, but when it turned your way you felt as if your blood had turned to hot tomato soup in your veins. "He's a spy and we could welcome him in with open arms, show him everything, and send him back with no harm done. But I want him. I want them both. And we're going to send their heads back over the mountains before the snow flies. Let them chew on that all winter." And he bellowed hot laughter at the people he had gathered together in one of the conference rooms at the Portland Civic Center. They smiled back, but their smiles were cold and uneasy. Aloud they might congratulate each other on having been singled out for such a responsibility, but inside, they wished that those happy, awful, weasel-like eyes had fixed on anyone but them. them.