Under the dome.

http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html


Stephen King

The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition


Chapter 62


What was most important for her right now about the Judge’s demise was that they had known when they had no business knowing. Was there a spy of their own back in the Free Zone? That was possible, she supposed; spying was a game two could play at. But Sue Stern had told her that the decision to send spies into the West had been strictly a committee thing, and she doubted very much if any of those seven were in the Flagg bag. Mother Abagail would have known if one of the committee had turned rotten, for one thing. Dayna was sure of it.

That left a very unappetizing alternative. Flagg himself had just known.










http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html


Stephen King

The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition


Chapter 66


Carl had come in around two on September 12, his cycle helmet under one arm. There was an ugly burn on his left cheek and blisters on one hand. There had been a fire. Bad, but not as bad as it could have been. A fuel truck had exploded, spewing burning petroleum all over the tarmac area.

“All right,” Lloyd had said. “I’ll see that the big guy knows. The guys that got hurt are at the infirmary?”

“Yeah. They are. I don’t think Freddy Campanari is going to live to see the sun go down. That leaves two pilots, me and Andy. Tell him that, and tell him something else when he gets back. I want that fuck Trashcan Man gone. That’s my price for staying.”

Lloyd gazed at Carl Hough. “Is it?”

“You’re damn well told.”

“Well, I tell you, Carl,” Lloyd said. “I can’t pass that message on. If you want to give orders to him, you’ll have to do it yourself.”

Carl looked suddenly confused and a little afraid. Fear sat strangely on that craggy face. “Yeah, I see your point. I’m just tired and fucked over, Lloyd. My face hurts like hell. I don’t mean to take it out on you.”

“That’s okay, man. It’s what I’m here for.” Sometimes he wished it wasn’t. Already his head was starting to ache.

Carl said, “But he’s gotta go. If I have to tell him that, I will. I know he’s got one of those black stones. He’s ace-high with the tall man, I guess. But, hey, listen.” Carl sat down and put his helmet on a baccarat table. “Trash was responsible for that fire. My Christ, how’re we ever going to get those planes up if one of the big guy’s men is torching the fucking pilots?”

Several people passing through the lobby of the Grand glanced uneasily over at the table where Lloyd and Carl sat.

“Keep your voice down, Carl.”

“Okay. But you see the problem, don’t you?”

“How sure are you that Trash did it?”

“Listen,” Carl said, leaning forward, “he was in the motor pool, all right? In there for a long time. Lots of guys saw him, not just me.”

“I thought he was out someplace. In the desert. You know, looking for stuff.”

“Well, he came back, all right? That sand-crawler he takes out was full of stuff. God knows where he gets it, I sure don’t. Well, he had the guys in stitches at coffee break. You know how he is. To him, weaponry is like candy is to a kid.”

“Yeah.”

“The last thing he showed us was one of those incendiary fuses. You pull the tab, and there’s this little burst of phosphorus. Then nothing for half an hour or forty minutes, depending on the size of the fuse, all right? You get it? Then there’s one hell of a fire. Small, but very intense.”

“Yeah.”

“So okay. Trashy’s showin us, just about droolin over the thing, in fact, and Freddy Campanari says, ‘Hey, people who play with fire wet the bed, Trash.’ And Steve Tobin—you know him, he’s funny like a rubber crutch—he says, ‘You guys better put away your matches, Trashy’s back in town.’ And Trash got really weird. He looked around at us, and he muttered under his breath. I was sitting right next to him and it sounded like he said, ‘Don’t ask me about old lady Semple’s check no more.’ That make any sense to you?”










http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html


Stephen King

The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition


Chapter 50


Sitting, rocking on the porch, her eye happened to fall upon an electrical plug-in plate set into the baseboard. Probably so folks could come out here in the summertime and listen to the radio or even have the baseball on that cute little round TV. Nothing in the whole country more common than those little wall-plates with the prong-slits in them. She’d even had them back in her squatter’s shack in Hemingford. You didn’t think nothing of those plates… unless they didn’t work anymore. Then you realized that one hell of a lot of a person’s life came out of them. All that spare time, that pleasure which the long-ago Don King had extolled her on… it came out of those switchplates set into the wall. With their potency taken away, you might as well use all those gadgets like the microwave oven and the “trash masher” to hang your hat and coat on.

Say! Her own little house had been better equipped to handle the death of those little switchplates than this one was. Here, someone had to bring her water fetched all the way from Boulder Creek, and it had to be boiled before you could use it, just for safety’s sake. Back home she’d had her own handpump. Here, Nick and Ralph had had to truck up an ugly gadget called a Port-O-San; they had put it in the back yard. At home she’d had her own outhouse. She would have traded the Maytag washer-dryer combination in a second for her own washtub, but she had gotten Nick to find her a new one, and Brad Kitchner had found her a scrub-board somewhere and some good old lye soap. They probably thought she was a good old pain in the ass, wanting to do her own washing—and so much of it—but cleanly went next to Godly, she had never sent her washing out in her whole life, and she didn’t mean to start now. She had her little accidents from time to time, too, as old folks often did, but as long as she could do her own wash, those accidents didn’t have to be anybody’s business but her own.

They would get the power back on, of course. It was one of the things God had shown her in her dreams. She knew a goodish number of things about what was to come here—some from the dreams, some from her own common sense. The two were too intertwined to tell apart.

Soon all these people would stop running around like chickens with their heads cut off and start pulling together. She was not a sociologist like that Glen Bateman (who always eyed her like a racetrack agent looking at a phony ten), but she knew that people always did pull together after a while. The curse and blessing of the human race was its chumminess. Why, if six people went floating down the Mississippi on a church roof in a flood, they’d start a bingo game as soon as the roof grounded on a sandbar.

First they’d want to form some sort of government, probably one they’d want to run around her. She couldn’t allow that, of course, as much as she would like to; that would not be God’s will. Let them run all the things that had to do with this earth—get the power back on? Fine. First thing she was going to do was try out that “trash masher.” Get the gas running so they wouldn’t freeze their bee-hinds off this winter. Let them pass their resolutions and make their plans, that was fine. She would keep her nose right out of that part. She would insist that Nick have a part in the running of it, and maybe Ralph. That Texan seemed all right, he knew enough to shut off his mouth when his brains weren’t running. She supposed they might want that fat boy, that Harold, and she wouldn’t stop them, but she didn’t like him. Harold made her nervous. All the time grinning, but the grin never touched his eyes. He was pleasant, he said the right things, but his eyes were like two cold flints poking out of the ground.

She thought that Harold had some kind of secret. Some smelly, nasty thing all wrapped up in a stinking poultice in the middle of his heart. She had no idea what it might be; it was not God’s will for her to see that, so it must not matter to His plan for this community. All the same, it troubled her to think that fat boy might be a part of their high councils… but she would say nothing.

Her business she thought rather complacently in her rocker, her place in their councils and deliberations had only to do with the dark man.

He had no name, although it pleased him to call himself Flagg… at least for the time being. And on the far side of the mountains, his work was already well begun. She did not know his plans; they were as veiled from her eyes as whatever secrets lay in that fat boy Harold’s heart. But she did not have to know the specifics. His goal was clear and simple: to destroy all of them.

Her understanding of him was surprisingly sophisticated. The people who had been drawn to the Free Zone all came to see her in this place, and she received them, although they sometimes made her tired… and they all wanted to tell her that they had dreamed of her and of him. They were terrified of him, and she nodded and comforted and soothed as best she could, but privately she thought that most of them wouldn’t know this Flagg if they met him on the street… unless he wanted to be noticed. They might feel him—a cold chill, the kind you got when a goose walked over your grave, a sudden hot feeling like a fever-flash, or a sharp and momentary drilling pain in the ears or the temples. But these people were wrong to think he had two heads, or six eyes, or big spike horns growing out of his temples. He probably didn’t look much different than the man who used to bring the milk or the mail.

She guessed that behind the conscious evil there was an unconscious blackness. That was what distinguished the earth’s children of darkness; they couldn’t make things but only break them. God the Creator had made man in His own image, and that meant that every man and woman who dwelt under God’s light was a creator of some kind, a person with an urge to stretch out his hand and shape the world into some rational pattern. The black man wanted—was able—only to unshape. Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 10:20 PM Pacific Time somewhere near Spokane Washington USA Friday 04 July 2014