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Stephen King |
Featured Excerpt
From The Stand (Complete and Uncut Edition) (1978, 1990)
The elevator hummed efficiently, marking off the floors. An alarm began to hoot–mournfully, as if it somehow knew it was warning of a situation which had already become a lost cause–when he used his special key to open it at the top, so he could enter the motor-pool area. Starkey imagined Len Creighton watching him on a succession of monitors as he first picked out a jeep and then drove it across the desert floor of the sprawling test site and through a gate marked HIGH SECURITY ZONE NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT SPECIAL CLEARANCE. The checkpoints looked like turnpike tollbooths. They were still manned, but the soldiers behind the yellowish glass were dead and rapidly mummifying in the dry desert heat. The booths were bulletproof, but they hadn’t been germproof. Their glazed and sunken eyes stared vacantly at Starkey as he motored past, the only moving thing along the tangle of dirt roads among the Quonset huts and low cinderblock buildings.
He stopped outside a squat blockhouse with a sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT A-1-A CLEARANCE on the door. He used one key to get in, and another to summon the elevator. A guard, dead as a doornail and stiff as a poker, stared at him from the glass-encased security station to the left of the elevator doors. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, Starkey stepped in quickly. He seemed to feel the gaze of the dead guard on him, a small weight of eyes like two dusty stones.
The elevator sank so rapidly his stomach turned over. A bell dinged softly when it came to a halt. The doors slid open, and the sweet odor of decay hit him like a soft slap. It wasn’t too strong because the air purifiers were still working, but not even the purifiers could dispose of that smell completely. When a man has died, he wants you to know about it, Starkey thought.
There were almost a dozen bodies sprawled in front of the elevator. Starkey minced among them, not wanting to tread on a decaying, waxy hand or trip over an outstretched leg. That might make him scream, and he most definitely didn’t want to do that. You didn’t want to scream in a tomb because the sound of it might drive you mad, and that’s exactly where he was: in a tomb. It looked like a well-financed scientific research project, but what it really was now was a tomb.
The elevator doors slid shut behind him; there was a hum as it began to go up automatically. It wouldn’t come down again unless somebody else keyed it, Starkey knew; as soon as the installation’s integrity had been breached, the computers had switched all the elevators to the general containment program. Why were these poor men and women lying here? Obviously they had been hoping the computers would fuck up the switch-over to the emergency procedures. Why not? It even had a certain logic. Everything else had fucked up.
Starkey walked down the corridor which led to the cafeteria, his heels clicking hollowly. Above, the fluorescents embedded in their long fixtures like inverted ice-cube trays threw a hard, shadowless light. There were more bodies. A man and a woman with their clothes off and holes in their heads. They screwed, Starkey thought, and then he shot her, and then he shot himself. Love among the viruses. The pistol, an army-issue .45, was still clutched in his hand. The tile floor was spotted with blood and gray stuff that looked like oatmeal. He felt a terrible and thankfully transient urge to bend down and touch the dead woman’s breasts, to see if they were hard or flaccid.
Farther down the hall a man sat with his back propped against a closed door, a sign tied around his neck with a shoelace. His chin had fallen forward, obscuring what was written there. Starkey put his fingers under the man’s chin and pushed his head back. As he did so, the man’s eyeballs fell back into his head with a meaty little thud. The words on the sign had been written in red Magic Marker. NOW YOU KNOW IT WORKS, the sign said. ANY QUESTIONS?
Starkey let go of the man’s chin. The head remained cocked at its stiff angle, the dark eye sockets staring raptly upward. Starkey stepped back. He was crying again. He suspected he was crying because he didn’t have any questions.
The cafeteria doors were propped open. Outside them was a large cork bulletin board. There was to have been a league bowl-off on June 20, Starkey saw. The Grim Gutterballers vs. The First Strikers for the Project championship. Also, Anna Floss wanted a ride to Denver or Boulder on July 9. She would share driving and expenses. Also, Richard Betts wanted to give away some friendly pups, half collie and half St. Bernard. Also, there were weekly nondenominational religious services in the caf.
Starkey read every announcement on the bulletin board, and then he went inside.
The smell in here was worse–rancid food as well as dead bodies. Starkey looked around with dull horror.
Some of them seemed to be looking at him.
“Men–” Starkey said, and then choked. He had no idea what he had been about to say.
He walked slowly over to where Frank D. Bruce lay with his face in his soup. He looked down at Frank D. Bruce for several moments. Then he pulled Frank D. Bruce’s head up by the hair. The soup-bowl came with him, still stuck on his face by soup which had long since congealed, and Starkey struck at it in horror, finally knocking it off. The bowl clunked to the floor, upside down. Most of the soup still clung to Frank D. Bruce’s face like moldy jelly. Starkey produced his handkerchief and wiped off as much of it as he could. Frank D. Bruce’s eyes appeared to be gummed shut by soup, but Starkey forbore to wipe the lids. He was afraid Frank D. Bruce’s eyes would fall back into his skull, like the eyes of the man with the sign. He was even more afraid that the lids, freed of the glue which held them, might roll up like windowshades. He was mostly afraid of what the expression in Frank D. Bruce’s eyes might be.
“Private Bruce,” Starkey said softly, “at ease.”
He put the handkerchief carefully over the face of Frank D. Bruce. It stuck there. Starkey turned and walked out of the cafeteria in long, even strides, as if on a parade ground.
Halfway back to the elevator he came to the man with the sign around his neck. Starkey sat down beside him, loosened the strap over the butt of his pistol, and put the barrel of the gun into his mouth.
When the shot came, it was muffled and undramatic. None of the corpses took the slightest notice. The air purifiers took care of the puff of smoke. In the bowels of Project Blue, there was silence. In the cafeteria, Starkey’s handkerchief came unstuck from Private Frank D. Bruce’s face and wafted to the floor. Frank D. Bruce did not seem to mind, but Len Creighton found himself looking into the monitor which showed Bruce more and more often, and wondering why in hell Billy couldn’t have gotten the soup out of the man’s eyebrows while he was at it. He was going no have to face the President of the United States soon, very soon, but the soup congealing in Frank D. Bruce’s eyebrows worried him more. Much more.
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Additional Excerpts
From The Stand (Complete and Uncut Edition) (1978, 1990)
« 02 »
“What do you want to do?” Jess asked, getting out his cigarettes.
“What do you want to do?”
He struck a light and for just a moment as cigarette smoke raftered up she clearly saw a man and a boy fighting for control of the same face.
“Oh hell,” he said.
“The choices as I see them,” she said. “We can get married and keep the baby. We can get married and give the baby up. Or we don’t get married and I keep the baby. Or–”
“Frannie–”
“Or we don’t get married and I don’t keep the baby. Or I could get an abortion. Does that cover everything? Have I left anything out?”
“Frannie, can’t we just talk–”
“We are talking!” she flashed at him. “You had your chance and you said ‘Oh hell.’ Your exact words. I have just outlined all of the possible choices. Of course I’ve had a little more time to work up an agenda.”
“You want a cigarette?”
“No. They’re bad for the baby.”
“Frannie, goddammit!”
“Why are you shouting?” she asked softly.
“Because you seem determined to aggravate me as much as you can,” Jess said hotly. He controlled himself. “I’m sorry. I just can’t think of this as my fault.”
“You can’t?” She looked at him with a cocked eyebrow. “And behold, a virgin shall conceive.”
“Do you have to be so goddam flip? You had the pill, you said. I took you at your word. Was I so wrong?”
“No. You weren’t so wrong. But that doesn’t change the fact.”
“I guess not,” he said gloomily, and pitched his cigarette out half-smoked. “So what do we do?”
“You keep asking me, Jesse. I just outlined the choices as I see them. I thought you might have some ideas. There’s suicide, but I’m not considering it at this point. So pick the other choice you like and we’ll talk about it.”
“Let’s get married,” he said in a sudden strong voice. He had the air of a man who has decided that the best way to solve the Gordian knot problem would be to hack right down through the middle of it. Full speed ahead and get the whiners belowdecks.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to marry you.”
It was as if his face was held together by a number of unseen bolts and each of them had suddenly been loosened a turn and a half. Everything sagged at once. The image was so cruelly comical that she had to rub her wounded tongue against the rough top of her mouth to keep from getting the giggles again. She didn’t want to laugh at Jess.
“Why not?” he asked. “Fran–”
“I have to think of my reasons why not. I’m not going to let you draw me into a discussion of my reasons why not, because right now I don’t know.”
“You don’t love me,” he said sulkily.
“In most cases, love and marriage are mutually exclusive states. Pick another choice.”
He was silent for a long time. He fiddled with a fresh cigarette but didn’t light it. At last he said: “I can’t pick another choice, Frannie, because you don’t want to discuss this. You want to score points off me.”
That touched her a little bit. She nodded. “Maybe you’re right. I’ve had a few scored off me in the last couple of weeks. Now you, Jess, you’re Joe College all the way. If a mugger came at you with a knife, you’d want to convene a seminar on the spot.”
“Oh for God’s sake.”
“Pick another choice.”
“No. You’ve got your reasons all figured out. Maybe I need a little time to think, too.”
“Okay. Would you take us back to the parking lot? I’ll drop you off and do some errands.”
He gazed at her, startled. “Frannie, I rode my bike all the way down from Portland. I’ve got a room at a motel outside of town. I thought we were going to spend the weekend together.”
“In your motel room. No, Jess. The situation has changed. You just get back on your ten-speed and bike back to Portland and you get in touch when you’ve thought about it a little more. No great hurry.”
“Stop riding me, Frannie.”
“No, Jess, you were the one who rode me,” she jeered in sudden, furious anger, and that was when he slapped her lightly backhand on the cheek.
He stared at her, stunned.
“I’m sorry, Fran.”
“Accepted,” she said colorlessly. “Drive on.”
« 03 »
He fell silent, brooding. Fred Goldsmith had died in 1973. He had been thirteen, Frannie four. The man who hit Fred had been drunk. He had a long list of traffic violations, including speeding, driving so as to endanger, and driving under the influence. Fred had lived seven days.
“I think abortion’s too clean a name for it,” Peter Goldsmith said. His lips moved slowly over each word, as if they pained him. “I think it’s infanticide, pure and simple. I’m sorry to say so, to be so . . . inflexible, set, whatever it is I’m being . . . about something you now have to consider, if only because the law says you may consider it. I told you I was an old man.”
“You’re not old, Daddy,” she murmured.
“I am, I am!” he said roughly. He looked suddenly distraught. “I’m an old man trying to give a yourg daughter advice, and it’s like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear. A drunk driver took my son’s life seventeen years ago and my wife has never been the same since. I’ve always seen the question of abortion in terms of Fred. I seem to be helpless to see it any other way, just as helpless as you were to stop your giggles when they came on you at that poetry reading, Frannie. Your mother would argue against it for all the standard reasons. Morality, she’d say. A morality that goes back two thousand years. The right to life. All our Western morality is based on that idea. I’ve read the philosophers. I range up and down them like a housewife with a dividend check in the Sears and Roebuck store. Your mother sticks with the Reader’s Digest, but it’s me that ends up arguing from feeling and her from the codes of morality. I just see Fred. He was destroyed inside. There was no chance for him. These right-to-life biddies hold up their pictures of babies drowned in salt, and arms and legs scraped out onto a steel table, so what? The end of a life is never pretty. I just see Fred, lying in that bed for seven days, everything that was ruined pasted over with bandages. Life is cheap, abortion makes it cheaper. I read more than she does, but she is the one who ends up making more sense on this one. What we do and what we think . . . those things are so often based on arbitrary judgments when they are right. I can’t get over that. It’s like a block in my throat, how all true logic seems to proceed from irrationality. From faith. I’m not making much sense, am I?”