http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
“I… I have to see Mr. Flagg,” she said. The strength went rapidly out of her voice, and it ended as a whisper.
“You do, huh? What do you think I am, his social secretary?”
“But… they said… to see you.”
“Who did?”
“Well, Angie Hirschfield did. It was her.”
“What’s your name?”
“Uh, Julie.” She giggled, but it was only a reflex. The scared look never left her face, and Lloyd wondered wearily what sort of shit was up in the fan now. A girl like this wouldn’t ask for Flagg unless it was very serious indeed. “Julie Lawry.”
“Well, Julie Lawry, Flagg isn’t in Las Vegas now.”
“When will he be back?”
“I don’t know. He comes and goes, and he doesn’t wear a beeper. He doesn’t explain himself to me, either. If you have something, give it to me and I’ll see that he gets the message.” She looked at him doubtfully and Lloyd repeated what he had told Carl Hough that afternoon. “It’s what I’m here for, Julie.”
“Okay.” Then, in a rush: “If it’s important, you tell him I’m the one told you. Julie Lawry.”
“Okay.”
“You won’t forget?”
“No, for Chrissake! Now what is it?”
She pouted. “Well, you don’t have to be so mean about it.”
He sighed and put the handful of cards he had been holding down on the table. “No,” he said. “I guess I don’t. Now, what is it?”
“That dummy. If he’s around, I figure he’s spying. I just thought you should know.” Her eyes glinted viciously. “Motherfucker pulled a gun on me.”
“What dummy?”
“Well, I saw the retard, and so I figured the dummy must be with him, you know? And they’re just not our type. I figure they must have come from the other side.”
“That’s what you figure, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I don’t know what the Christ you’re talking about. It’s been a long day and I’m tired. If you don’t start talking some sense, Julie, I’m going up to bed.”
Julie sat down, crossed her legs, and told Lloyd about her meeting with Nick Andros and Tom Cullen in Pratt, Kansas, her hometown. About the Pepto-Bismol (“I was just having a little fun with the softie, and this deaf-and-dumb pulls a gun on me!”). She even told him about shooting at them as they left town.
“Which all proves what?” Lloyd asked when she finished. He had been a little intrigued with the word “spy,” but since then had lapsed into a semidaze of boredom.
Julie pouted again and lit a cigarette. “I told you. That feeb, he’s over here now. I just bet he’s spying.”
“Tom Cullen, you said his name was?”
“Yes.”
He had the vaguest sort of memory. Cullen was a big blond guy, a few cards short the deck for sure, but surely not as bad as this high-iron bitch was making out. He tried for more and came up empty. People were still streaming into Vegas in numbers of sixty to a hundred a day. It was becoming impossible to keep them all straight, and Flagg said the immigration was going to get a lot heavier before it tapered off. He supposed he could go to Paul Burlson, who was keeping a file of Vegas residents and find something out about this Cullen dude.
“Are you going to arrest him?” Julie asked.
Lloyd looked at her. “I’ll arrest you if you don’t get off my case,” he said.
“Nice fucking guy!” Julie Lawry cried, her voice rising shrewishly. She jumped to her feet, glaring at him. In her tight white cotton shorts, her legs seemed to go all the way up to her chin. “Try to do you a favor!”
“I’ll check it.”
“Yeah, right, I know that story.”
She stomped off, fanny swinging in tight little circles of indignation.
Lloyd watched her with a certain weary amusement, thinking there were a lot of chicks like her in the world—even now, after the superflu, he was willing to bet there were a lot around. Easy to slap the make on, but watch out for the fingernails afterward. Kissing cousins to those spiders that gobble up their mates after sex. Two months had gone by and she still bore that mute guy a grudge. What did she say his name was? Andros?
Lloyd pulled a battered black notebook from his back pocket, wet his finger, and paged over to a blank sheet. This was his memory book, and it was chock-full of little notes to himself—everything from a reminder to take a shave before meeting with Flagg to a boxed memorandum to get the contents of Las Vegas’ pharmacies inventoried before they started to lose morphine and codeine. It would be time to get another little book soon.
In his flat and scrawling grammar school script he wrote: Nick Andros or maybe Androtes—mute. In town? And below that: Tom Cullen, check out with Paul. He tucked the book back into his pocket. Forty miles northeast, the dark man had consummated his long-term relationship with Nadine Cross under the glittering desert stars. He would have been very interested to know that a friend of Nick Andros’s was in Las Vegas.
But he slept.
Lloyd looked morosely down at his solitaire game, forgetting about Julie Lawry and her grudge and her tight little ass. He cheated out another ace, and his thoughts turned dolefully back to the Trashcan Man and what Flagg might say—or do—when Lloyd told him.
At the same time Julie Lawry was leaving the Cub Bar, feeling shat upon for doing no more than what she saw as her civic duty, Tom Cullen stood by the picture window of his apartment in another part of the city, looking dreamily out at the full moon.
It was time to go.
Time to go back.
This apartment was not like his house in Boulder. This place was furnished but not decorated. He had not put up so much as a single poster or hung a single stuffed bird from piano wire. This place had been only a way station, and now it was time to go on. He was glad. He hated it here. It had a kind of smell to it here, a dry and rotten smell that you could never quite-put your finger on. The people were mostly nice, and some of them he liked every bit as well as the people in Boulder, folks like Angie and that little boy, Dinny. No one made fun of him because he was slow. They had given him a job and joked with him, and on lunchbreak they’d trade out of their dinner-buckets for something out of someone else’s that looked better. They were nice folks, not much different from Boulder folks, as far as he could tell, but—
But they had that smell about them.
They all seemed to be waiting and watching. Sometimes strange silences fell among them and their eyes seemed to glaze over, as if they were all having the same uneasy dream. They did things without asking for explanations of why they were doing them, or what it was for. It was as if these people were wearing happy-folks faces, but their real faces, their underneath-faces, were monster faces. He had seen a scary movie about that once. That kind of monster was called a werewolf.
The moon rode over the desert, ghostly, high, and free.
He had seen Dayna, from the Free Zone. He had seen her once and never again. What had happened to her? Had she been spying, too? Had she gone back?
He didn’t know. But he was afraid.
There was a small knapsack in the La-Z-Boy chair that faced the apartment’s useless color console TV. The knapsack was full of vacuum-sealed ham strips and Slim Jims and Saltines. He picked it up and put it on.
Travel at night, sleep in the day.
He stepped out into the courtyard of the building without a backward glance. The moon was so bright that he cast a shadow on the cracked cement where the would-be high rollers had once parked their cars with the out-of-state plates.
He looked up at the ghostly coin that floated in the sky.
“M-O-O-N, that spells moon,” he whispered. “Laws, yes. Tom Cullen knows what that means.”
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
Chapter 70
Trashcan Man had found what he wanted.
He came along a hallway deep underground, a hallway as dark as a mine pit. In his left hand he held a flashlight. In his right hand he held a gun, because it was spooky down here. He was riding an electric tram that rolled almost silently along the wide corridor. The only sound it made was a low, almost subaural hum.
The tram consisted of a seat for the driver and a large carry space. Resting in the carry space was an atomic warhead.
It was heavy.
Trash could not make an intelligent guess as to just how heavy it was, because he hadn’t even been able to budge it by hand. It was long and cylindrical. It was cold. Running his hand over its curved surface, he had found it hard to believe that such a cold dead lump of metal could have the potential for so much heat.
He had found it at four in the morning. He had gone back to the motor pool and had gotten a chainfall. He had brought the chainfall back down and had rigged it over the warhead. Ninety minutes later, it was nestled cozily into the electric tram, nose up. Stamped on the nose was A161410USAF. The hard rubber tires of the tram had settled appreciably when he put it in.
Now he was coming to the end of the hallway. Straight ahead was the large freight elevator with its doors standing invitingly open. It was plenty big enough to take the tram, but of course there was no electricity. Trash had gotten down by the stairs. He had brought the chainfall down the same way. The chainfall was light compared to the warhead. It only weighed a hundred and fifty pounds or so. And still it had been a major chore getting it down five courses of stairs.
How was he going to get the warhead up those stairs?
Power-driver winch, his mind whispered.
Sitting on the driver’s seat and shining his flash randomly around, Trash nodded to himself. Sure, that was the ticket. Winch it up. Set a motor topside and pull it up, stair-riser by stair-riser, if he had to. But where was he going to find five hundred feet of chain all in one piece?
Well, he probably wasn’t. But he could weld pieces of chain together. Would that work? Would the welds hold? It was hard to say. And even if they did, what about all the switchbacks the stairs made going up?
He hopped down and ran a caressing hand over the smooth, deadly surface of the warhead in the silent darkness.
Love would find a way.
Leaving the warhead in the tram, he began to climb the stairs again to see what he could find. A base like this, there would be a little of everything. He would find what he needed.
He climbed two flights and paused to catch his breath. He suddenly wondered: Have I been taking radiation? They shielded all that stuff, shielded it with lead. But in the movies you saw on TV, the men who handled radioactive stuff were always wearing those protective suits and film badges that turned color if you got a dose. Because it was silent. You couldn’t see it. It just settled into your flesh and your bones. You didn’t even know you were sick until you started puking and losing your hair and having to run to the bathroom every few minutes.
Was all that going to happen to him?
He discovered that he didn’t care. He was going to get that bomb up. Somehow he was going to get it up.
