Characters in The Stand

… And this kid tryin to grow on his face what springs up wild in his asshole calls himself Ace High.” They all nodded at him. “This is our new boy,” Lloyd said. “Name’s Trashcan Man.” Hands were shaken all around.

… The first thing was to get down to Addie Richardson’s henhouse, and that was a goodish way, four or five miles. She found herself wondering if the Lord was going to send her an eagle to fly her those four miles, or send Elijah in his fiery chariot to give …

… another lawyer, a young man of about twenty-six named Al Bundell, who had come in late that afternoon with the Dr. Richardson party, and he accepted the chairmanship when it was offered, saying only that he hoped no one would do anything too terrible in the next month or so, …

… He got three of the Tattered Remnants—Barry Grieg, Al Spellman, and Johnny McCall—and two other musicians he had worked with in the past, Neil Goodman and Wayne Stukey. They cut the album in nine days, absolutely all the studio time they could get.

… He didn’t say anything else, but Alberta Edmonton belongs to all the organizations Carla belongs to, so he didn’t have to. Both of us knew she’s been inviting something like this, Fran. She’s president of the Town Historical Committee, …

… Alice Underwood fixed him three eggs, bacon, toast, juice, coffee. When he had finished all but the coffee, he lit a cigarette and pushed back from the table. She flashed the cigarette a disapproving look but said nothing. That restored some of his confidence—some, but not much.

… He began to think about Allie McFarlane, and something he had heard about Allie on the streets, just before the shit hit the fan. People were saying that Allie, who was about the third-biggest in Detroit, had just gotten a fine shipment.

… Honest to God, Ambrose, you sound worse’n I do.” “You don’t tell the doctor, the doctor tells you.” As Baker pulled his shirt off, Soames turned to Nick and said, “But you know it’s funny how a cold will just start making the rounds.

… She walked slowly, trying her best to cope with the thought that she might have fallen out of love with him in the space of the eleven days that she had known she was “a little bit preggers,” in the words of Amy Lauder.

… She thought she might have been dreaming of her grandson Anders, who had been killed senselessly in a hunting accident when he was but six.) On July 18, then southwest of Sterling, Colorado, and still some miles from Brush, he had met The Kid.

… people who had come up from town on motorcycles—Andrea Terminello, Dean Wykoff, Dale Pedersen, and a young girl named Patsy Stone. Stu did not tell Fran that Patsy, who had been teaching Leo how to play the flute, had been struck and nearly beheaded by a whirling chunk of Glen …

… Andrew “Poke” Freeman, in for simple assault, was released in April 1989. He had occupied a bed next to Lloyd Henreid, and had told him that if Lloyd was interested in a big score, he knew about something interesting in Vegas. Lloyd was willing.

… 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.”

… He became aware that the guard had left them alone and that his lawyer—his name was Andy Devins, Lloyd remembered—was looking at him in a strange way. It was the way you might look at a rattlesnake whose back has been broken but whose deadly bite is probably still unimpaired.

… well that night, possibly because her partner was Angela Dupray, her best friend. They seemed to enjoy a happy kind of telepathy. They won all three rubbers resoundingly, making a grand slam during the last. For Sarah, the only fly in the ointment was that she seemed to be coming …

… His “mother” that week, Angelina Hirschfield, was sitting on a park bench and talking with a young girl who had drifted into Las Vegas about five weeks before, ten days or so after Angie herself had come in. Angie Hirschfield was twenty-seven.

… 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.

His mother had died on June the twenty-fourth in the Murfreesboro, Georgia, General Hospital. On the twenty-fifth, his father and younger sister, two-year-old April, had died. On June the twenty-seventh, his older brother Mike died, leaving Sam to shift for himself.

“Somebody told me there were bloodsuckers on me and I ought to get out of the pool until they dropped off.” “Something about a big party?” “Yeah.” “I heard about that,” she said. “Big spender.” “Is Wayne around, Arlene?”

… Arthur Stimson lived in Reno, Nevada. On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, after swimming in Lake Tahoe, he stepped on a rusty nail. The wound turned gangrenous. He diagnosed the trouble by smell and tried to amputate his foot. Halfway through the operation he fainted and died of shock and …

… remembering one time when his Aunt Betty had gotten a crying fit over some bread that didn’t rise—she was big with his little cousin Laddie then, seven months or so—and Stu could remember her wiping her eyes with the corner of a dishtowel and telling him to never mind, …

… What must your Uncle Andrew and Aunt Carlene think? You embarrassed me half to death! The parlor was where you were tongue-tied, the parlor was where you itched and couldn’t scratch, the parlor was dictatorial commands, boring conversation, relatives pinching cheeks, …

… In the course of the meal he infected Babe, the dishwasher, two truckers in a corner booth, the man who came in to deliver bread, and the man who came in to change the records on the juke.

“Barry Dorgan.” “Get him for me. And I never called you.” “Yes, Lloyd.” She sounded afraid now. Lloyd was afraid, too, but he was also excited. A moment later Dorgan was on. He was a good man, for which Lloyd was profoundly grateful.

… He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition.

… It might mean the end of the water-rights squabble he had been having with Ben Conveigh, who was rabid on the subjects of niggers like John Freemantle and nigger-lovers like Gary Sites. It might even mean that the county tax assessor would stop his endless gouging.

… She went back to the living room after taking a peek out the pantry window to make sure Bert Hodges was okay. A commercial was on now, two dancing bottles of toilet bowl cleaner. Lila let her eyes drift around the room and wished her own house looked this nice.

… I haven’t been on a journey since I was a little girl and my father took my sister Bess and me to the zoo. Let’s go, Larry.” It was a walk that Larry Underwood never forgot.

… had joked at school about not being able to remember all his kids’ names, but the order of their passing was engraved on his memory: Jeff on the twenty-second, Marty and Helen on the twenty-third, his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, …

Bill Arnold hollered, and somebody pushed Rebecca Freemantle into the wall. Someone else—Chet Deacon, by the looks—wrapped one of the red velvet window curtains around Rebecca and then tied her in with one of the gold ropes.

… in Enfield except her and an old man named Bill Dadds had died. Bill had been sick, Lucy said, but he seemed to have thrown it off entirely. Then, on the morning of Independence Day, she had found Bill dead on Main Street, swollen up and black, like everyone else.

… I was pumping gas at Bill Hapscomb’s gas station then. He used to hire me on, if he could, when I was laid off at the calculator plant in town. He had me on part-time, eleven P.M. to closing, which was three in the morning back in those days.

… Carl Hough and Bill Jamieson had taken off from the Springs at 6:02 P.M. to run a recon mission east of Vegas. One of their other trainee pilots, Cliff Benson, had been riding with Carl as an observer. At 6:12 P.M. both helicopters had blown up in the air.

… “He shot Bill Markson!” he yelled in a high, queer voice. “T’other one shot Missus Storm! Hell of a note! I shot t’other one! He’s deader’n a shitbug! Like to shoot this one too, iff’n you boys’ll stand away!”

… It was Bill Richardson, Addie’s brother-in-law. He had been well picked over by foraging animals. “Poor man,” Abagail said. “Poor, poor man. Flights of angels sing you to y’rest, Billy Richardson.” She turned back to the cool, inviting house.

… Bill Scanlon and Ted Frampton found another walkie-talkie up in Sunrise Amphitheater, and we assume the bomb was set off from there. It—” “Assume, my ass!” Ted Frampton shouted from the third row. “It was that bastard Lauder and his little whore!”

Len Creighton nodded. “Billy. This ... Christ, I don’t know how to tell you.” “I think one word at a time might go best, soldier.”

… 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?”

… They broke apart to let them through—Billy Verecker, Monty Sullivan, Carlos Ortega, men they all knew. “There’s two folks in that car,” Hap said, drawing Monty aside. “Woman and a little girl. Both dead.” “Holy crow! You sure?” “Yeah. This guy, he don’t know.

Vincent Hogan and Billy Warner were in the two Saltine-box cells on Nick’s left. Mike Childress was in one of the two on the right.

… Bob Palmer, who anchored the morning news, brought them upstairs inside a flight bag where he usually carried his notes, pencils, and several legal-sized notepads. The entire broadcast facility was cordoned off by what they had been told were National Guardsmen, …

With him? I doubt it.” “Bobbi Rengarten in Dorchester or Debbie Smith in Somersworth, I suppose.” Frannie slowly gathered herself together and got up. She was still crying but she was beginning to be mad, as well.

… Bobby Terry was sitting inside the Copperfield Five-and-Dime, a stack of comic books by his side, wondering what sort of shape the Oxbow Dam was in, and if the sluice gates had been left open or shut.

“Angelina.” He pronounced it Angeyeena. “Then Bonnie again. I like Bonnie. But I like Angelina, too.” “Don’t tell her Lloyd gave you candy. Angelina would spank Lloyd.” Dinny promised not to tell and ran off giggling at the image of Angelina spanking Lloyd.

“Him and that electrician, Brad Kitchner, have been looking at the power plant.” He rubbed the side of his nose. “I was out this morning. Figured all those chiefs orta have at least one Indian to order around.”

… Brad Lauder had been a huge, brawny man, a foreman at the woolen mill in Kennebunk. He would have had very little idea of what to make of the fat, peculiar son that his loins had produced.

Bradley Caide and his wife went up to Little Rock after their baby passed away. One of those crib deaths. Awful thing. I don’t blame them for going.” Nick pointed at his own chest and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

… Third Prize, 1977 National Science Fair, Constructed by Brian Ball, Rutland, Vermont. Say the word and ring the bell up to twelve miles away! Some hours later that evening, Harold came back downstairs, put the cover on the shoebox, and carried it carefully upstairs.

… What you gonna do if they throws rotten tomatas at her like they did at Brick Sullivan when he tried to sing in the minstrel show? And what are you going to say if she comes to you with those tomatas all over the front of her dress …

… BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED REPEAT BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED HE WAS FOUND WORKING IN A STOREFRONT CLINIC HERE TRIED AND SUMMARILY EXECUTED FOR TREASON AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SOME OF THOSE BEING TREATED ATTEMPTED TO INTERFERE 14 CIVILIANS SHOT, 6 KILLED …

… Two months before he graduated from high school, she had died, leaving Stu with his brother Bryce to support. Stu had turned down the athletic scholarship and had gone to work in the calculator factory. And finally it was Bryce, three years’ Stu’s junior, who had made it out.

… Most of the kids you hung around with are gone now and good riddance to that bunch of hoods but I think Buddy Marx is working at that print shop on Stricker Avenue.” Just thinking of that note was enough to make him wince.

Crickets sang and frogs croaked down in some wet place, probably Cal Goodell’s cowpond.

… In Swanville, Maine, a ten-year-old girl named Candice Moran fell off her bike and died of a fractured skull. Milton Craslow, a rancher in Harding County, New Mexico, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died half an hour later.

… The door to one of the examining rooms opened and Candy Jones came out, following a tall, stooped man in corduroy slacks and a sport shirt with the Izod alligator on the breast. Candy was looking doubtfully at a bottle of pink stuff which she held in one hand.

… Carl Hough had brought the news. He had been pissed off to a high extreme, and he was not a man to be taken lightly. He had been a pilot for Ozark Airlines before the plague, was an ex-Marine, …

… Maybe now he could be just Don Elbert again instead of the Trashcan Man, the way Carley Yates was now just Carl Yates who sold cars at the Stout Chrysler-Plymouth dealership here in town. Except that Carl Yates was gone, everyone was gone, …

… “You’re pregnant,” Carla Goldsmith repeated for the second time. “Yes, Mother.” Her voice was very dry but she would not allow herself to wet her lips. She pressed them together instead.

… They broke apart to let them through—Billy Verecker, Monty Sullivan, Carlos Ortega, men they all knew. “There’s two folks in that car,” Hap said, drawing Monty aside. “Woman and a little girl. Both dead.” “Holy crow! You sure?” “Yeah. This guy, he don’t know.

… Now, back in ’82, when she had turned a hundred, Cathy and David had offered her a TV set and she had taken them up on that one. The TV was a marvelous machine for passing the time when you were by your lonesome.

… The head of the Burial Committee, Chad Norris, was out at what he referred to, with an almost grisly calm, as Burial Site #1. It was ten miles southwest of Boulder in an area that had once been stripmined for coal.

… A California driver’s license identified him as Charles D. Campion. There was an army card, and pictures of his wife and daughter encased in plastic. Hap didn’t want to look at the pictures. He stuffed the wallet back into the dead man’s pocket and told Carlos to turn off the …

… Charles Manson was there, the x on his forehead healed to a white, twisted scar, clapping and chanting. And Richard Speck was there, looking up at Larry with cocky, impudent eyes, an unfiltered cigarette jittering between his lips. They were flanking the dark man.

… He certainly could not remember much that had happened to him before that, except that he came originally from Nebraska and that he had once attended high school classes with a red-haired, bandy-legged boy named Charles Starkweather.

… Three soldiers tried to come up the east fire stairs, and a janitor named Charles Yorkin, armed with an army-issue carbine, fired a shot over their heads. It was the only shot fired. Viewers in the WBZ-TV broadcast area saw Bob Palmer stop his newscast …

… She remembered that one of her grammar school friends, a boy named Charley Biggers whom everyone had called Biggy, had had his appendix out during the summer between fifth and sixth grades. He was only in the hospital for two or three days.

… Charlie Impening, who had more or less become the Zone’s resident doomcrier (he had been the one to pass the cheerful news about snow in September), began to suggest to people that if Mother Abagail had bugged out, maybe that was a sign for all of them to bug out.

“Where are the other people I came in here with?” Deitz brought a paper out of an inside pocket. “Victor Palfrey, deceased. Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased.” The names reeled in Stu’s head.

… Someone else—Chet Deacon, by the looks—wrapped one of the red velvet window curtains around Rebecca and then tied her in with one of the gold ropes. He was yelling: Looka here! Dressed coon! Dressed coon! Others rushed over to where Chet Deacon was, …

… Dick Vollman, Chip Hobart, and sixteen-year-old Tony Donahue sat in a breezeway half a block up from Larry’s tract house, passing a bottle of Canadian Club back and forth, chasing it with warm Seven-Up. Patty Kroger sat with Shirley Hammett.

I thought I’d look up some of the old guys. Mark ... Galen ... David ... Chris ... those guys.” She got up, went to the window, and tugged it up.

Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased.” The names reeled in Stu’s head. Chris the bartender.

… But when Christopher and Susy came and said they wanted to get her on the city water, she had turned them down just as she had turned down Molly and Jim on their kind offer of a flushing toilet.

… in Mountain City there was a man named Christopher Bradenton who would see that he had a clean car and some clean papers and then the country would come alive in all its glorious possibilities, …

… Frannie remembered with a sudden stab of nostalgia that was unexpectedly painful, back in the days when they could still cry over the ending of Charlotte’s Web and moan happily over Chuckie Mayo, the cutest boy in school.

… One of their other trainee pilots, Cliff Benson, had been riding with Carl as an observer. At 6:12 P.M. both helicopters had blown up in the air. Stunned though he had been, Stan had sent five men over to Hangar 9, …

… “This is Colonel Albert Philips, U.S. Army. We are listening, Chief Burleigh. Over.” “Base, this is unit 16. The kids are coming together at the war memorial. They appear to be turning toward the soldiers. This looks nasty. Over.”

… “That dratted Consuela is hiding the requisition forms again. Not that they do much good; we never get all the stuff we need, but we get plenty I wouldn’t know what to do with if my life depended on it.”

… Some, like Freddy Delancey and Curtis Beauchamp, simply fell down unconscious and were later driven back to the jackleg infirmary that had been set up over the town hall, and there they died. By yesterday morning Frannie’s father, who had opposed the whole idea of the barricades, …

How was he supposed to tell Cynthia about this? I’m sorry, Cindy. Vic took a high dive into a cold bowl of soup today. Here, have a “downer.”

… Her last cow, Daisy, had been sold in 1975, but in 1987 the shed had still smelled of cow. Probably did to this day. No matter; there were worse smells. “Ma’am?” She looked back. Ralph was sitting next to Nick now, …

… up from town on motorcycles—Andrea Terminello, Dean Wykoff, Dale Pedersen, and a young girl named Patsy Stone. Stu did not tell Fran that Patsy, who had been teaching Leo how to play the flute, had been struck and nearly beheaded by a whirling chunk of Glen Bateman’s Wollensak tape recorder.

… Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell. How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl. Dayna and her friends asked the trio to join them, …

… George shook his hand and then introduced Dan Lathrop. Dan said, “We’ve heard there was an explosion in Las Vegas. You actually saw it?” “Yes.” “People around here seem to think it was a nuclear blast. Is that true?” “Yes.”

… There were about twenty kids in Vegas, ages ranging from four (that was Daniel McCarthy, the pet of everyone in town, known as Dinny) up to fifteen. They had found two people with teaching certificates, and classes went on five days a week.

… his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, and finally Pat—and Pat had seemed to be getting better, right up to the end.

… He and his partner, Dave Roberts (now asleep in the apartment overhead), had discussed the dam at great length. It had been raining for a week. The Snake was high. Suppose that old Oxbow Dam decided to let go? Bad news.

… Now, back in ’82, when she had turned a hundred, Cathy and David had offered her a TV set and she had taken them up on that one. The TV was a marvelous machine for passing the time when you were by your lonesome.

… It was David’s turn to have the weekly poker game at their house, and she just wouldn’t be able to sleep with all that noise going on ... unless she had a little self-prescribed sedative first, which in her case would be two sloe gin fizzes.

I thought I’d look up some of the old guys. Mark ... Galen ... David ... Chris ... those guys.” She got up, went to the window, and tugged it up.

… “Massingill, Zone 10. Are you there, Blue Base? This message is coded Annie Oakley, Urgent-plus-10. Come in, if you’re there. Over.” “This is Len, David. We can skip the jargon, I think. Nobody’s listening.” “It’s out of control, Len. Everything.

David Trotts was a black farmhand from over Valparaiso way, and he had come pretty nearly thirty miles one way to court her.

… She thought: My name is Dayna Roberta Jurgens, and I am afraid, but I have been afraid before. All he can take from me is what I would have to give up someday anyhow—my life. I will not let him break me down.

… had come up from town on motorcycles—Andrea Terminello, Dean Wykoff, Dale Pedersen, and a young girl named Patsy Stone. Stu did not tell Fran that Patsy, who had been teaching Leo how to play the flute, had been struck and nearly beheaded by a whirling chunk of Glen Bateman’s Wollensak …

With him? I doubt it.” “Bobbi Rengarten in Dorchester or Debbie Smith in Somersworth, I suppose.” Frannie slowly gathered herself together and got up. She was still crying but she was beginning to be mad, as well.

… Her name was DeeDee Packalotte (and weren’t there some jokes about that name), and about a year ago she and Don Cullen run off together. They had been seen just once, in a cheap fleabag motel not far away, in Slapout, Oklahoma, …

… He had gone to sleep to get away from the headache but he had had a lot of crazy dreams about a man in a black suit like the one that Revrunt Deiffenbaker always wore.

Morons might believe it, but Bobby Terry’s mother Delores had never raised any morons. He knew the way stories got around, growing between the mouth that spoke and the ear that listened.

… A young radical named Desmond Ramage had planted better than sixteen pounds of plastique, originally earmarked for various Midwestern courthouses and state legislatures, in the ATC lobby. The explosive was great; the timer was cruddy. Ramage was vaporized along with all sorts of harmless weather equipment …

… His youngest brother, Dev, had died of pneumonia the year he began at the yards, and Stu had never quite gotten over that. Guilt, he supposed. He had loved Dev the best ... but his passing had also meant there was one less mouth to feed.

… Wayne said, “You’re the best thing to happen to Dewey Deck in a long time, man.” “How much is he into me for?” “Not bad on pot. Pot’s cheap. Twelve hundred. Eight grand on coke.” For a minute Larry thought he was going to puke.

… “I’m Dick Deitz. Denninger said you wouldn’t play ball anymore unless somebody told you what the score was.” Stu nodded. “Good.” Deitz sat on the edge of the bed. He was a small brown man, and sitting there with his elbows cocked just above his knees, …

… Nick, Tom Cullen, and Ralph had happened on Dick Ellis halfway across Kansas, walking along the side of the road with a pack on his back and a hiking staff in one hand. He was a veterinarian.

… Two days after the Judge joined them, a couple who introduced themselves as Dick and Sally Vollman had thrown in with Larry and his assorted company of survivors. Lucy thought it extremely unlikely that the flu had spared a man and wife, …

… The man with the sandy beard and sunglasses they had known only as Doc. He and Virge had been part of an army detachment which had been sent to Akron when the flu broke out. Their job had been “media relations,” …

… Her name was DeeDee Packalotte (and weren’t there some jokes about that name), and about a year ago she and Don Cullen run off together. They had been seen just once, in a cheap fleabag motel not far away, in Slapout, Oklahoma, …

… seventies he had been acquainted with a man named Donald DeFreeze, and had suggested that DeFreeze take the name Cinque. He had helped lay plans that resulted in the kidnapping of an heiress, and it had been he who suggested that the heiress be made crazy instead of simply ransomed.

… But say, didn’t that Mr. Donald King of Peru, Indiana, talk sweet. My! She had never seen him again, but she had never forgotten his name, either. She just bet he had gone on to break some white lady’s heart.

… Donald Merwin Elbert, known to the intimates of his dim and confusing grade-school past as the Trashcan Man, had wandered up and down the streets of Powtanville, Indiana, cringing from the voices in his head, dodging away and putting up his hands to shield against stones thrown by ghosts.

… I tell them how you picked up Donny Roberts’s guitar when you were in junior high and how you were playing better than him in half an hour, even though he had lessons ever since second grade.

… They were waiting in the outer office of Dr. Brenden Sweeney by two in the afternoon. By then Ed was sneezing, too. Sweeney’s waiting room was full; they didn’t get in to see the doctor until nearly four o’clock.

… Dr. Denninger. He was young. He had black hair, olive skin, sharp features, and a mealy mouth. “Patty Greer says you gave her some trouble,” Denninger’s chest-speaker said as he clopped over to Stu. “She’s quite upset.”

… Dr. Emmanual Ezwick still lay dead on the floor, but the centrifuge had stopped. At 1940 hours last night, the centrifuge had begun to emit fine tendrils of smoke. At 1995 hours the sound pickups in Ezwick’s lab had transmitted …

“Oh, once. But Dr. Holmes took care of it.” “Mom, those chiropractors are—” just frauds. He bit his tongue. “Are what?” He shrugged uncomfortably in the face of her hooked smile.

… Well, he got Dr. James to look at this Campion, and the two of them called in another doctor that I don’t know. Then they got on the phone to Houston. And around three this mornin they come into that little airport outside of Braintree.

… Her last doctor, Dr. Staunton, had told her to steer clear of salty foods, but what did he know? She had outlived both of the doctors who had presumed to advise her on her health since her eighty-sixth birthday, …

… You’re putting on weight, Dr. Warner had said. Lead in the seat. No good for your heart. Try jogging. So he had gotten a sweatsuit and had gone jogging every night, for short distances at the start, …

… “Base, this is Dudley Chumm. Oh shit, this is unit 12. Sorry, base. There’s a bunch of kids coming down Burrows Drive. About a hundred and fifty. Headed for the mall. Singing or chanting or some damn thing.

… Eddie Warfield was a local hero. He had come from a family even poorer than Stu’s own, had covered himself with glory as quarterback of the regional high school team, had gone on to Texas A&M with an athletic scholarship, …

… The New Yorker was Edward M. Norris, lieutenant of police, detective squad, in the Big Apple’s 87th Precinct. This was his first real vacation in five years. He and his family had had a fine time. The kids had been in seventh heaven at Disney World in Orlando, …

… Mrs. Eileen Drummond of Clewiston, Florida, got very drunk on DeKuyper crème de menthe on the afternoon of July 2. She wanted to get drunk because if she was drunk she wouldn’t have to think about her family, …

… The nurses called him Dr. Elder, but he was no doctor. He was in his mid-fifties, hard-eyed and humorless. None of the doctors before Elder had felt a need to hold a gun on him. Elder scared Stu because there would be no reasoning or pleading with such a man.

… Nick Andros sat in the study of the house on Baseline Drive that he shared with Ralph Brentner and Ralph’s woman, Elise. It was almost dark. The house was a beauty, sitting below the bulk of Flagstaff Mountain …

… Jesus Christ, when I think what he did to Eric Strellerton, that smartass lawyer me and Trashy went to L.A. with ...” “What did he do?” For a long time she didn’t think he was going to answer.

… He got the Lake Shore Drive address of one Erin D. McFarlane from the Detroit phone book and walked out there. It was almost dark by the time he made it and his feet hurt. He was no longer trying to tell himself that this was just a casual stroll; …

… We can declassify Princess back to plain old Eva Hodges, female, age four, Caucasian. Her coach-and-four turned back into a pumpkin and a bunch of mice late this afternoon. To look at her, you’d think she was perfectly normal, not even a sniffle.

… “Finnegan, there, the coroner—” “That was a smartass,” Hap said fiercely. “You should have seen him struttin around in here, Joe Bob. Just like a pea turkey that got its first hardon. Shushin people and all that.”

Frances Goldsmith, Secretary The turnout for the meeting the next evening was almost total, and for the first time Larry Underwood, who had been in the Zone only a week, …

… his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, and finally Pat—and Pat had seemed to be getting better, right up to the end.

… And at the second table, near the end, there was a man who had been identified as Frank D. Bruce. His face was in a bowl of what appeared to be Campbell’s Chunky Sirloin Soup. The first monitor showed only a digital clock.

… “You and Sites and that Frank Fenner, you whipped this up together. That’s fine for them, John Freemantle, but what’s got into your head? They’re white! You go hunker down with them in the backyard and talk about plowin!

… “PFC Franklin Stern, front and center, puh-leeze.” The armed men flanking the audience on all sides bent to look at name tags while a cameraman obviously new to the trade panned the audience in jerky sweeps.

… Then, in ’60, there came your brother Fred. She just about loved that boy to death, Fran. Fred was her father’s name, you know. She had a miscarriage in ’65, and we both figured that was the end of it.

… 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 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.

… Some, like Freddy Delancey and Curtis Beauchamp, simply fell down unconscious and were later driven back to the jackleg infirmary that had been set up over the town hall, and there they died. By yesterday morning Frannie’s father, who had opposed the whole idea of the barricades, …

I thought I’d look up some of the old guys. Mark ... Galen ... David ... Chris ... those guys.” She got up, went to the window, and tugged it up.

… FROM: GARETH ZONE 6 LITTLE ROCK TO: CREIGHTON COMMANDING RE: OPERATION CARNIVAL FOLLOWS: BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED REPEAT BRODSKY NEUTRALIZED HE WAS FOUND WORKING IN A STOREFRONT CLINIC HERE TRIED AND SUMMARILY EXECUTED FOR TREASON AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA …

… “Garvey was very taken with you,” Susan said, nodding toward Frannie. Frannie shuddered. Dayna leaned closer to them and spoke softly. “And they’d made it pretty clear whose place you were going to take.” She nodded her head almost imperceptibly at Shirley Hammet, …

… But he also saw that Gary Sites was handing him something more than a chance at survival: Gary was giving him a chance to prosper with the rest of the corn belt. As a member of the Grange, his problems buying good seed would end.

Not all of them, not the rabid ones like Ben Conveigh and his half-brother George, not the Arnolds and the Deacons, but all the others.

… And George is going to die just about six days after he gets to Korea, time enough for just one letter and then bang bang bang. George is— Vic, you help me now and put that horse in and that is my last word ON it.

… It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with George Bush back when the old bushwhacker had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago.

… as Palmer had told George Dickerson the night before, they were the only over-fifty Guardsmen he had ever seen. At 9:01 A.M., just after Palmer had begun to read the soothing copy he had been handed ten minutes before by an army noncom, a coup took place.

… George McDougall lived in Nyack, New York. He had been a teacher of high school mathematics, specializing in remedial work. He and his wife had been practicing Catholics, and Harriett McDougall had borne him eleven children, nine boys and two girls.

… One of them’s a doctor, name of George Richardson. He sounds like a fine man. Level-headed.” “Well, that’s great news!” “He’s from Derbyshire, Tennessee. Most of the people in this group are sort of mid-Southern.

… his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, and finally Pat—and Pat had seemed to be getting better, right up to the end.

… When she was ten she had ridden her bike into the mailbox post while looking back over her shoulder to yell something to Georgette McGuire. She cut her head, bloodied her nose, lacerated both knees, and had actually grayed out for a few moments with shock.

… “Geraldo’s been breathing your air for the last three days, via convector. This disease that your friends have passes easily from humans to guinea pigs and vice versa. If you were catching, we figure Geraldo would be dead by now.”

… the key words in this conversation were spelled out while Gina McCone played unconcernedly with the buttons on Mother Abagail’s dress). Gina had bounced back with a speed that had surprised them all. She had formed an instant attachment for Ralph and his jaunty hat.

… I simply tell myself that this July there is no one on earth painting better landscapes than Glendon Pequod Bateman, B.A., M.A., M.F.A. A cheap ego trip, but mine own.” “Was Kojak your dog before?”

… God did speak to folks; hadn’t He talked to Noah about the ark, telling him how many cubits long and how many deep and how many wide? Yes. And she believed He had spoken to her as well, not from a burning bush or out of a pillar of fire, …

… He knew this guy, “one-time business associate” might describe him best, and this guy was known in certain circles as Gorgeous George. He did some piecework for a group of people with mostly Italian and Sicilian names. George was strictly part-time help.

… Frannie had been sitting by the window for almost three hours, trying to write a letter to Grace Duggan, a high school chum who was now going to Smith. It wasn’t a confessional letter dealing with her pregnancy or the scene with her mother …

… Just before her Gretchen Tilyons had been on and had done a racy French dance, showing her ankles and petticoats to the raucous whistles, cheers, and stamping feet of the men in the audience. She stood in the thick silence, …

… There were fifty-five thousand people in the Stadium, all standing, the players in the field with their caps over their hearts, Guidry on the mound, Rickey Henderson was standing in deep left field (“—by the twilight’s last gleaming—”), …

… Gus Dinsmore, the public beach parking lot attendant, said he guessed that so many cars must be just stopped dead along the road that even those manned (or womaned) by able drivers would be unable to move.

This is Halliday, base. Do you copy? Over.” “I copy, 17. Over.” “I’m behind Chumm. There’s another two hundred kids coming west to east toward the mall. They’ve got signs, just like in the sixties.

Hank Rawson really looks great. And that Trashcan Man, he’s a fucking genius. About some things he’s not too bright, but when it comes to weapons, he’s incredible.

… He didn’t think he would be as bored as Harlan Enders or as shamefully poor as the Carons—there was poor Paul, hardly ever missed a day at the shop in his life, and yet he and his wife had been forced to sell their house …

… On my school papers, I always signed my name Harold Emery Lauder. I signed my manuscripts—poor things that they were—the same way. God help me, I once wrote it on the roof of a barn in letters three feet high.

… He and his wife had been practicing Catholics, and Harriett McDougall had borne him eleven children, nine boys and two girls. So between June 22, when his nine-year-old son Jeff had succumbed to what was then diagnosed as “flu-related pneumonia,” …

He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on.

Harry Dunbarton yelled exuberantly, and there was appreciative laughter. It’s like a camp meeting, Larry thought. Next they’ll be singing hymns. If Mother Abagail was here, I bet we would be already.

… “I switched off with Harry Masters,” Peter said. “Fran’s already told me, Carla. We are going to be grandparents.” “Grandparents!” she shrieked. An ugly, confused sort of laughter jarred out of her. “You leave this to me.

… The speeder was Harry Trent of Braintree, an insurance man. He had been doing sixty-five miles per in a fifty-mile-an-hour zone. Joe Bob gave him a speeding ticket. Trent accepted it humbly and then amused Joe Bob by trying to sell him insurance on his house and his life.

… Richie Groudemore and Carley and Norm Morrisette and Hatch Cunningham, the one who was getting bald even though he was only eighteen and all of the others called him Hatch Cunnilingus. And they were leering at him.

… At quarter of ten on the morning of July 2, Sam wandered into a field of wild blackberries behind Hattie Reynolds’s house. Bemused and vacant-eyed, he zigzagged among blackberry bushes that were almost twice as tall as he was, …

… Trish expected that Hector’s symptoms would abate in the morning—croup was a lying-down sickness—but by noon of the twentieth, she admitted to herself that it wasn’t happening. The aspirin wasn’t controlling the fever; poor Heck was just glass-eyed with it.

… By the order of Randall Flagg, Leader of the People and First Citizen, this man, Hector Alonzo Drogan by name, is ordered executed by an act of crucifixion, this penalty so ordered for the crime of drug use.”

… “Helen ... my wife ... used to make bread twice a week. Just lately it seems to be all I want. Give me three slices of bread and some strawberry jam and I think I could die happy.”

… Jeff on the twenty-second, Marty and Helen on the twenty-third, his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, …

… The only ones in on it were Dayna and Patty and Helen Roget ... one of the girls Ronnie shot back there. And me, of course. Helen said, ‘If they catch us trying to spit the pills into our hands, they’re going to kill us.’

… Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week. Victor Palfrey was retired and smoked stinking home-rolled cigarettes, which were all he could afford.

… In 1916, when she had been thirty-four, she had married Henry Hardesty, a black farmer from Wheeler County up north. He had come to court her special. Henry was a widower with seven children, all but two of them grown up and gone away.

… Herb got scared and left her. He didn’t get scared of Joline’s husband—he got scared of her. And just before her husband came back on leave, Joline had a nervous breakdown …

… his press secretary, Hubert Ross, has branded reports that the President will speak from a set mocked up to look like the Oval Office but actually deep in the White House bunker “hysterical, vicious, and totally unfounded.”

… And the man who had taken over the marshaling chore in Stu’s absence, Hugh Petrella, was not the sort of man Stu much cottoned to. The very fact that Petrella had campaigned for the job made Stu feel uneasy.

… Irma Fayette lived in Lodi, California. She was a lady of twenty-six, a virgin, morbidly afraid of rape. Her life had been one long nightmare since June twenty-third, when looting had broken out in town and there had been no police to stop the looters.

… “Jack’s got it too. Should he come in?” “No, but you can make the starch baths a family affair.” Candy nodded dolefully and then spotted Fran. “Hi, Frannie, how’s the girl?” “Okay. How’s by you?”

… You’ve got to see Jack Cleveland, first chance you get. He knows who we’ve got behind both curtains, iron and bamboo. He knows how to get in touch with them, and he won’t stick at what has to be done.

… Frannie covered him with a clean sheet and had left him on old Jack Hanson’s bed, which overlooked the ocean. Then she had come here and since then had been skipping rocks across the pond, not thinking about much of anything.

A fellow named Jack Jackson, who was a car mechanic. A young R.N. named Laurie Constable—she would come in handy.

… she heard a sparrow, crickets, the far high hum of a plane, someone calling for Jackie to come on in now, a power mower, a car with a glasspack muffler accelerating down US 1.

… It was a small-town, once-weekly West Virginia newspaper called the Durbin Call-Clarion, put out by a retired lawyer named James D. Hogliss, and its circulation figures had always been good because Hogliss had been a fiery defender of the miners’ right to organize …

… Jane Baker said to her husband: “Your cold sounds worse. You’ve been taking too much on, John Baker. And you didn’t eat enough to keep a fly alive.”

… did, all of them did, although neither Rachel nor Jane Fargood would talk to her about it later. And she had never felt particularly welcome in either girl’s room after that night. It was as if they were both a little afraid to get too close to her after that.

… Larry glanced at the doorway to the kitchen, but Lucy had gone outside to talk to Jane Hovington from next door. “You think he’s after us,” he said in a low voice. “That’s a nice thought to have just before dinner.

… “Janey herself isn’t in,” Arlene was saying. “She’s got a fever and swollen glands, she said. I thought that old whore was too tough to get sick.” “Three minutes are up, signal when through,” the operator broke in.

I think about Acapulco a lot. Now if I could just convince Janey—” It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, Stu thought, watching Fran pump water, if the Free Zone did fall apart.

… Everybody was dead or had run off, except for a young guard named Jason Debbins, who sat behind the wheel of a prison laundry truck and shot himself. And where else did he have to go then, except home?

… Jeff on the twenty-second, Marty and Helen on the twenty-third, his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, …

… particularly Jenny Engstrom, a tough and beautiful ex-nightclub dancer who was now running the cherry-picker’s controls. She was the type of girl Dayna would have wanted for her best friend, and it confused her that Jenny was over here, on the dark man’s side.

BOY. B.W. 6 LB. 9 OZ. M. FRANCES GOLDSMITH, RM. 209 F. JESSE RIDER (D.). Peter was crying. His small hands were balled into fists.

… Molly’s Jim told her once that she was like a dog that couldn’t pass a fireplug without at least lifting one leg to salute it, and that had made her laugh until tears spouted from her eyes and streamed down her cheeks.

… Jim Lee of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, hooked up all the electrical outlets in his house to a gasoline generator and then electrocuted himself trying to start it up. Richard Hoggins was a young black man who had lived his entire life in Detroit, Michigan.

… I know Jim Warrington, he drives one of the Sanford ambulances, and unless there’s a car wreck on 95 he sits around and plays gin rummy all day. What’s this list?” He was nearly screaming.

… “The men working on the culvert are going very slowly, according to Joe Rackman, who lives out that way. I was at the Rackmans’ about two hours ago, looking at their little boy, who is very ill indeed.

… They reached the corner of Fifth and East Thirty-ninth shortly after meeting that man (Rita, with a hysterical sort of good humor, insisted on referring to him as John Bearsford Tipton, a name which meant nothing to Larry).

… in March of 1902 Gary Sites had come to the house to tell John Freemantle that he had been voted into the Grange. He was the first black man to belong to the Grange in the whole state of Nebraska.

… So after we got poor old Freddy over to the infirmary, John Waite and I went over there. John’s in charge of the motor pool and he was just about pissing himself. He’d seen Trash in there earlier.

John Wayne Gacy was behind them. Flagg was leading the chant. Tomorrow, Larry thought again, stumbling from one too-tall mike to the next under the hot dreamlights of Madison Square Garden.

… I ought to get the oil changed in the car before the pistons fall right out of their sockets or whatever (and I wonder what Johnny down at the Citgo would say if he knew I’m-pregnant).

… He got three of the Tattered Remnants—Barry Grieg, Al Spellman, and Johnny McCall—and two other musicians he had worked with in the past, Neil Goodman and Wayne Stukey. They cut the album in nine days, absolutely all the studio time they could get.

Joline Majors. Joline wasn’t in high school. She dropped out to marry her boyfriend. He was in the Navy. She was pregnant when they got married, but she lost the baby.

… Premeditation was proved by a diary this fellow, Jon Markham, had kept. The jury sentenced him to death.” “Bad shit,” Lloyd whispered. Devins nodded, and gave Lloyd a slightly sour smile. “The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, …

… a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent.

… We have a Texas highway patrolman named Joseph Robert Brentwood. His cousin owns the gas station where Campion ended up. He dropped by yesterday morning to tell Hapscomb the health people were coming. We picked him up three hours ago and he’s en route to Atlanta now.

… Judge Pechert raved at those ten women and two men for twenty minutes. I thought he was going to have apoplexy.” “If I was found not guilty, they couldn’t try me again, could they?” “Absolutely not.”

… In Milltown, Kentucky, Judy Horton was quite pleased with events. Judy was seventeen years old and pretty. Two years before, she had made two serious mistakes: she had allowed herself to get pregnant, and she had allowed her parents to talk her into marrying the boy responsible, …

… It became suddenly hard to separate himself from Julie, the girl he had been dating since his gig at Gino’s. She introduced him to all sorts of people, few of them people he really wanted to see.

Are you all right?” Julie Lawry didn’t answer. She stared after Tom Cullen. In a little while, she began to smile.

… “June Brinkmeyer,” the redhead said. “Well, you c’n sleep with me, June, unless you’ve some other mind. The bed ain’t big enough for two, and I don’t think you’d want to sleep with an old bundle of sticks like me even if it was, …

… He could remember being shaken awake on Saturday morning, it must have been a week or so ago, to hear Kasey Kasem spin his record as a debut song at number thirty-six on “American Top Forty.”

… “Trash, this here is Ken DeMott. The fella with the bald spot is Hector Drogan. And this kid tryin to grow on his face what springs up wild in his asshole calls himself Ace High.” They all nodded at him.

… Just now Kojak (who still thought of himself occasionally as Big Steve, which had been his original name) was content to drift in the place in between. The wolves had come for him in Nebraska, …

… remembering one time when his Aunt Betty had gotten a crying fit over some bread that didn’t rise—she was big with his little cousin Laddie then, seven months or so—and Stu could remember her wiping her eyes with the corner of a dishtowel …

… FROM: LANDON ZONE 2 NEW YORK TO: CREIGHTON COMMANDING RE: OPERATION CARNIVAL FOLLOWS: NEW YORK CORDON STILL OPERATIVE DISPOSAL OF BODIES PROCEEDING CITY RELATIVELY QUIET X COVER STORY UNRAVELING FASTER THAN EXPECTED BUT SO FAR NOTHING WE CAN’T HANDLE FROM CITY POPULATION …

… Then Larry Underwood said mildly: “How-do.” The little man who looked like a CPA stepped forward. He was still twiddling with the Magnum. “Are you Glendon Bateman, Lawson Underwood, Stuart Redman, and Ralph Brentner?”

… the addition of Mark Zellman, who had been a welder in upstate New York, and Laurie Constable, a twenty-six-year-old nurse. And the puzzled discussion had led to yet another upsetting argument about the dreams.

Get Baby LaVon. We got to get out of here.” “Why?” she asked, getting out of bed. Dark fear had seized her. Nothing seemed right. This was like a dream.

… Len Creighton nodded. “Billy. This ... Christ, I don’t know how to tell you.” “I think one word at a time might go best, soldier.” “Those men who handled Campion’s body are through their prelims at Atlanta, and the news isn’t good.”

he said with sudden force and great clarity. “Leo Rockway, that’s me! I’m Leo!” And he sprang into Mother Abagail’s arms, laughing. That generated laughter and some applause from the crowd.

… The completed message read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING TO THE SUBMARINE RACES WITH LEONARD KATZ. “You did that!” Patty said to Sandy as she finally sat up again. “I didn’t, Patty! Honest!”

… Good thing Lester Crowley had pulled him away in time. But, he added, someday Lester Crowley wouldn’t be there. He sighed, as if remembering he wouldn’t be either, then brightened and began telling her about an idea he’d had for a car antenna concealed in the hood ornament.

A man named Lewis Deschamps had lost an eye. Ralph Brentner had lost the third and fourth fingers on his left hand. “How badly am I hurt?” Fran asked him.

… He had been laughing and crying and threatening to blow the balls off someone named Lieutenant Morton. Lieutenant Morton had been nowhere in sight, which was probably a good thing for him, if he was still alive.

… Lila Bruett was in the living room, watching “The Young and the Restless.” She hoped Sally wouldn’t return until it was over. Ralph Hodges had bought a big color TV when times had been better in Arnette, …

… There were some, like Linda and that no-account salesman she had married, who didn’t care to come calling, but there were the good ones like Molly and Jim and David and Cathy, enough to make up for a thousand Lindas …

… “I’m Lloyd Henreid. Pleased to meet you, Trash. Welcome aboard the good ship Lollypop.” Trashcan Man shook the offered hand and had to struggle to keep from weeping with gratitude. So far as he could remember, …

… It was an old tractor tire that her brother Lucas had hung here in 1922. The rope had been changed many times between then and now, but never the tire. Now the canvas showed through in many places, …

… And that was how they met Lucy Swann. She was eager to go with them when they told her where they were headed, and that they had reason to believe there were at least two other people there, and possibly more.

… Luke and Bobby looked around from the old and rusty dump truck they had been arguing over. As always when he saw his kids, Norm felt dragged two ways at once. His heart ached to see them wearing hand-me-downs …

… “This is Major Alfred Nunn, United States Army. I am taking provisional and temporary control of United States forces in the San Francisco area. The handful of traitors present in this HQ have been dealt with.

… It was Manuel, the bouncer in that sleazy little Nuevo Laredo whorehouse, telling him his twenty dollars was used up and it would be another twenty if he wanted to stay all night. It was a nurse in a white all-over suit …

… It was more Marcy than me that settled Wes down. He thought the sun rose and set on that baby. He thought ...” “Don’t,” Nadine said. “All that was before.” That word again, Larry thought.

… Someone—either Laurie Constable or Marcy Spruce—looked into the room and then passed on. It was a moment that Stu never forgot. “What?” Fran whispered at last. George said, “You mustn’t get your hopes up.”

… The girl’s name was Maria and she had said she was a ... what? Oral hygienist, was that it? Larry didn’t know how much she knew about hygiene, but she was great on oral.

I thought I’d look up some of the old guys. Mark ... Galen ... David ... Chris ... those guys.” She got up, went to the window, and tugged it up.

… Harold, Stu, Glen Bateman, Mark Braddock, Perion McCarthy. Take Sominex tonight and sleep ... It wasn’t Sominex they were on but half a grain of Veronal apiece. It had been Stu’s idea when the dreams got really bad …

… Judy had also allowed Steve Phillips and Mark Collins to “work their will” on her; they were both on the Milltown High football team (the Milltown Cougars, to be exact, fight-fight-fight-fight-for-the-dear-blue-and-white) and she was a cheerleader.

“The name’s Zellman. Mark Zellman. From Lowville, New York. I dreamed about you.” And she was faced with a sudden choice that was clear-cut for only an instant in her groping mind.

The kids, Marsha, Stanley, and Hector, infected the kids they played with on the tourist court’s playground—kids bound for west Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

… Jeff on the twenty-second, Marty and Helen on the twenty-third, his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, …

His pumps were insured, and the insurance was paid up. Mary had harped on the insurance ahead of everything. “Guy must have been pretty drunk,” Norm said.

… At this point she suddenly remembered Mary Beth Gooch was dead, and that her opportunity to become a beautician or an interior decorator to the stars had passed with her ... and everyone and everything else. This seemed to strike her with a more genuine sort of grief.

… when a large inmate named Mathers came over and yanked him up by the collar. Mathers’s head was shaved bald, à la Telly Savalas, and it gleamed benignly in the hot desert air. “Now wait a minute,” Lloyd said.

… Her brothers Micah and Matthew had been in the yard; her father had been on the porch, looking at a mailorder catalogue. They had all come running and for a moment they had been struck frozen by the sight of Abagail, …

… New York or Boston would make Mavis Impening’s boy Charlie feel a whole hell of a lot safer. He had no takers. People were tired and ready to sit. If it got cold and there was no heat, they might move, but not before.

… Max Underwood had been done in more by lending credit than taking it. So when it came to that hard streak? Who did Larry have to thank? Or blame? His tears couldn’t change that stony outcropping in his character …

… She’d had five children by Davy Trotts; one of them, Maybelle, had choked to death on a piece of apple in the back yard of the Old Place. Abby had been hanging clothes and she had turned around to see the baby lying on her back, …

… its earliest traceable progenitor had risen out of the nameless crowd of Londoners long enough to be recorded in some very old church records as Merton Downs, Freemason. Her family tree had been published four years ago in The New England Genealogist, …

… Her brothers Micah and Matthew had been in the yard; her father had been on the porch, looking at a mailorder catalogue. They had all come running and for a moment they had been struck frozen by the sight of Abagail, …

… On June the twenty-seventh, his older brother Mike died, leaving Sam to shift for himself. Sam had been in shock ever since the death of his mother. He wandered carelessly up and down the streets of Murfreesboro, …

… Mike Childress was in one of the two on the right. The other was empty and it was empty because Ray Booth, he of the purple LSU fraternity ring, had flown the coop. “Hey, dummy!” Childress called.

… For no good reason she remembered that until the third grade little Mikey Post from down the street had called her Fan. “The baby. It’s fine.” Fran found a Kleenex and held it tightly.

… Milton Craslow, a rancher in Harding County, New Mexico, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died half an hour later. In Milltown, Kentucky, Judy Horton was quite pleased with events. Judy was seventeen years old and pretty.

he yelled in a high, queer voice. “T’other one shot Missus Storm! Hell of a note! I shot t’other one! He’s deader’n a shitbug!

… Molly, her great-granddaughter, and her husband had given her a set of false teeth for Mother’s Day just a year later, the year she herself had been ninety-three, but they hurt her gums and now she only wore them when she knew Molly and Jim were coming.

… They broke apart to let them through—Billy Verecker, Monty Sullivan, Carlos Ortega, men they all knew. “There’s two folks in that car,” Hap said, drawing Monty aside. “Woman and a little girl. Both dead.” “Holy crow! You sure?”

… The first one was to Mort “Gino” Green. Larry told him he’d have to find someone else to play “Yellow Bird” while the customers ate his lousy undercooked pasta. Then he called everyone he could think of, …

… The cupola atop Moses Richardson’s barn was explosively hot. Sweat had been trickling down her body by the time they got to the hayloft, but by the time they reached the top of the rickety flight of stairs leading from the loft to the cupola, …

… Mr. Braceman, the Methodist minister, also said he would stop by. I’m afraid he’ll have a lot of calls to make before the day is over. You’ll be careful of those three you have locked up, won’t you?”

If you track in, Mr. Freeman will be on me like a shot. I swear Goshen he can smell dirt. Dirt’s his enemy, all right.” They were on the stairs now.

… Mr. Geoghan is gonna be on us like a ton of bricks if the damned floor-wax doesn’t stop going out.” “I didn’t get in a barroom fight and I wasn’t in a strip-joint. It wasn’t anything like that.

… Mr. Norbutt had decided Tom was “getting on well enough” to be trusted handling an axe, and about the “big boys” who had jumped Tom one night and how Tom had “fought em all off ’til they was just about dead, …

… Mr. Norton had left town. Just about everybody had locked up and left town, it seemed like, except for Mom and her friend Mrs. Blakely, and they were both dead. Now the no-talking-man was trying the door.

… That man had been a certain Mr. Oswald, and he had taken some of Oswald’s tracts and he still had a couple, very old and crumpled, in one of his many pockets. He had sat on a hundred different Committees of Responsibility.

… Sights jittering by: cars wrecked off the road, Mr. Strang’s blue mailbox with the flag up, a dead dog with its legs up, a powerline down in a cornfield. The hand was not pushing him quite so hard now.

… Tom had found his mother at Mrs. Blakely’s house and they were both dead in the living room and so Tom had stolen away. Jesus wouldn’t come and take dead people up to heaven if anyone was watching, Tom said …

… Mrs. Halliday is going to come in and sit with her tomorrow. She wants Mrs. Halliday so they can work out an agenda for the July meeting of the Historical Society.” He sighed windily and lightning scratched the wire again.

… It’s worse for Mrs. Halsey with her arthritis. She’s on five. Don’t forget to wipe your feet. If you track in, Mr. Freeman will be on me like a shot. I swear Goshen he can smell dirt.

… Mrs. Lathrop is down sick, and the whole Richie family, and most of those no-accounts out on the Barker Road are coughing their brains out. Even Billy Warner in there’s hacking away.” Baker had wormed out of his undershirt.

… After that day, Mrs. Prynne had become something of a seldom caller. In her first year of junior high she had gotten a bad conduct mark on her report card, and of course she was invited into the parlor …

… the year he burned up old Mrs. Semple’s pension check, and he got caught again. Sally Elbert Greeley went into hysterics the one time her new husband mentioned sending the boy to that place down in Terre Haute …

… She would have gone to her father, but since her father was at work, she had stumbled into the parlor where her mother was serving tea to Mrs. Venner and Mrs. Prynne.

… She said: “I’m Nadine Cross. This is Joe. I’m happy to meet you.” “Larry Underwood.” They shook hands, both smiling faintly at the absurdity. “Let’s walk back to the road,” Nadine said.

… A year after that she had married Nate Brooks, and people had talked—oh yes, people talk, how people do love to talk, sometimes it seemed that was all they had to do.

… You can even go downtown and have a spot of beer with them, if that Nate Jackson will let you into his saloon. Fine! I know what you’ve been through these last years—none better.

… Neil Diamond was thinking of recording one of his songs, a tune called “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” Diamond was doing an album, all his own stuff except for an old Buddy Holly tune, “Peggy Sue Got Married,” and maybe this Larry Underwood tune.

… He got three of the Tattered Remnants—Barry Grieg, Al Spellman, and Johnny McCall—and two other musicians he had worked with in the past, Neil Goodman and Wayne Stukey. They cut the album in nine days, absolutely all the studio time they could get.

… “I’m Nick Andros. I’m a deaf-mute. I’m traveling with a man named Tom Cullen, who is lightly retarded. He can’t read or understand many of the things I can act out unless they’re very simple.

… Richie Groudemore and Carley and Norm Morrisette and Hatch Cunningham, the one who was getting bald even though he was only eighteen and all of the others called him Hatch Cunnilingus. And they were leering at him.

… He remembered taking Norma, his wife, to a big hospital in Houston when they diagnosed the cancer. Everyplace you went in there they had little maps on the walls with little arrows pointing at a dot.

… Georgie’s gone courting Norma Willis. You get that horse your ownself, Vic, and put his nosebag on like a good boy. Ain’t my job. Victor, you love your mamma, now.

… Norman Bruett and Tommy Wannamaker, who had both worked in the paper factory, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago. Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week.

… It was in the parlor that her mother had talked to her, grimly, explicitly, and at length, after she caught Frannie and Norman Burstein examining each other in the barn, their clothes piled in one amicable heap on a haybale to one side.

… Norman Kellogg, the Louisianian who was driving Harold’s truck, backed up to the edge of the plastic. The tailgate slammed down and the first bodies fell out onto the plastic crawsheet like partially stiffened ragdolls.

… Like a deck of cards swiftly dealt with the faces up, he seemed to see every dog he’d had since his mom had given him Old Spike, when Stu was only five years old. A lot of dogs.

… “I think you’d be too heavy, honey,” the older woman, Olivia Walker, said. “Nonsense,” Abagail said. “The day I can’t take a little one on my lap for a spell will be the day they wind me in my shroud.

… He had seen Parker Nason and his wife, the elderly people from the trailer park near Stu’s house. Stu guessed that they had netted up everyone who had been in the gas station …

… June 29, when his sixteen-year-old daughter Patricia (and oh God she had been so young and so achingly beautiful) had succumbed to what everyone—those that were left—was then calling tube-neck, …

… The other four were people who had come up from town on motorcycles—Andrea Terminello, Dean Wykoff, Dale Pedersen, and a young girl named Patsy Stone. Stu did not tell Fran that Patsy, who had been teaching Leo how to play the flute, …

… “Father dear, your baby’s here,” a girl named Patty something-or-other said, and giggled. “It must be my father, he died of a heart attack when I was three.” “It’s writing some more,” Sandy said.

… “Patty Greer says you gave her some trouble,” Denninger’s chest-speaker said as he clopped over to Stu. “She’s quite upset.” “No need for her to be,” Stu said easily.

Patty Kroger, who was seventeen and absolutely beautiful, occasionally added something.

… Lloyd wasn’t completely sure that Paul Burlson had the lung capacity to shout. He was a scrawny little man with thick lenses in his glasses, and some men called him Mr. Cool …

… Fran wondered if he was thinking of poor Paul Caron, who had been his friend since before Fran herself was born, and decided not to ask. At any rate, she didn’t need him to tell her that he had socked away enough in the good years …

… Peggy Tate’s (another high school friend and mutual aquaintance) new job as a Senate page. The impending marriage of Amy Lauder. The letter just wouldn’t allow itself to be written.

… Harold, Stu, Glen Bateman, Mark Braddock, Perion McCarthy. Take Sominex tonight and sleep ... It wasn’t Sominex they were on but half a grain of Veronal apiece.

… Peter Goldsmith hadn’t been content with Social Security; he had never trusted it, even in the days before the system began to break down under recession, inflation, and the steadily increasing number of people on the books.

… She thought about Stu’s eyes, about the first sight of her baby, Peter Goldsmith-Redman. She dreamed that Stu was with her, in her room. “Fran?” Nothing had worked out the way it should have.

Get down there with Chumm and Peters and block them off. It sounds like they’re headed into a tornado. Over.” “Roger. Over and out.”

I dunno, Petey, how? I dunno either, but it helps if you’re the Trashcan Man! HeeheehahahaHawHawHaw!

… Her parents had died, her little boy Petie had died (that was sort of sad, but she got over it in a couple of days), then Waldo’s parents had died, and finally Waldo himself had died and she was free.

… if He had been a mortal, He would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann’s general store back in Hemingford Home. He played red to black, white to black.

… I tried to get Tom ... and Rachel said he was out, that a lot of people were really sick ... so I called the Sanford Hospital and they said their ambulances were out on calls, …

She and one of the dead women, Rachel Carmody, had been picked up on July 17, outside Columbus.

… She had gone upstairs to ask someone on the third floor of the dorm, a girl named Rachel Timms, about the assignment in a remedial reading class they shared. The room had been filled with girls, …

… Ralph Brentner asked if either Stu or Glen would write out Stu’s motion about the search-party so he could add it to the agenda, which he plans to print at the high school tonight. Stu said he’d be glad to.

For Ralph Hodges’s wife. The three elements slowly came together in his mind. Lila had gone off to sit Sally Hodges’s three kids to earn a lousy dollar and had stuck him with Luke and Bobby.

The Walkin Dude. The tall man. And Ratty Erwins called him Old Creeping Judas. If he had known about the Judge, didn’t it stand to reason that he knew about her?

… “That’s Ray Booth,” he said. “My brother-in-law. Thanks, kid. Five in the morning and my day’s wrecked already.” Nick’s eyes opened a little wider, and he made a cautious gesture of commiseration.

… The highest-rated morning program in Springfield, Missouri, was KLFT’s morning phone-in show, “Speak Your Piece,” with Ray Flowers. He had six phone lines into his studio booth, and on the morning of June 26, he was the only KLFT employee to show up for work.

… When he told John and Rebecca Freemantle, “Whatever Abagail thinks is right, why, I reckon that’s what’s to do,” she had blessed him for it and told her mother and father she intended to go ahead.

… Ralph set up Reg Stoner’s chainfall in the barn, and at Abagail’s direction, Dick was finally able to get a rope firmly around the back leg of one of the yearlings. Squealing and thrashing, …

… Regina Wentworth is being cared for by some of the women who were in our party. I believe—I hope—that she’s going to come out of the mental fugue-state she’s currently in.

A Smith. A Rennett. And a great many others.

… She and Rhoda couldn’t swing the rent much longer without a third. “And we both come from big families,” Debbie said. “Crying babies don’t bother us.” Fran said she’d be ready to move in by the first of July, …

… Spent today working for a man named Rich Ellerton about 6 miles west of here. I cleaned his barn & put up a load of hay in his loft. Last week I was in Watts, Okla., running fence.

… it was Rich Groudemore from Powtanville, grinning and picking his teeth with a match, his fingers black with grease because he’d strolled up to the pool-hall from the Texaco on the corner to have a game of nine-ball on his break.

… Rich Moffat was sitting in a doorway across the street with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his newsboy’s pouch, and a flying panel of corrugated steel siding struck him and killed him instantly. He would break no more plate-glass windows.

… By then Richard, the oldest son, had come running, his face pale and scared. He and his father exchanged a sober, frightened glance. “I never saw a weasel do nothing like that in all my life,” John Freemantle said, …

… Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, and finally Pat—and Pat had seemed to be getting better, right up to the end. George thought he would go mad.

… “This is Campus Security Chief Richard Burleigh now speaking to the head of the military forces encamped on the south side of this campus. Repeat: this is Campus Security Chief Burleigh.

… Dayna had left Xenia in the company of Richard Darliss and Damon Bracknell. How many others had been alive in Xenia after the flu? Only three that she had seen, a very old man, a woman, and a little girl.

… An old man named Richard Farris whom everyone called the Judge; he looked at her keenly and almost made her feel uncomfortable again. Dick Vollman. Sandy DuChiens—pretty name, that, French. Harry Dunbarton, a man who had sold spectacles for a living only three months ago.

… Richard Hoggins was a young black man who had lived his entire life in Detroit, Michigan. He had been addicted to the fine white powder he called “hehrawn” for the last five years.

It was a good one. Larry met Neil Diamond, also Robbie Robertson, also Richard Perry. He got mention on the album’s inner sleeve and got paid union scale.

… And Richard Speck was there, looking up at Larry with cocky, impudent eyes, an unfiltered cigarette jittering between his lips. They were flanking the dark man. John Wayne Gacy was behind them. Flagg was leading the chant.

… There were fifty-five thousand people in the Stadium, all standing, the players in the field with their caps over their hearts, Guidry on the mound, Rickey Henderson was standing in deep left field …

… I don’t know where he gets it, Rita. Maybe from his grandfather. He was an ordained minister and they say he gave the most wonderful sermons ... Watching the letters improve as time passed.

My name is Rita Blakemoor.” “Pleased to know you. I’m Larry Underwood.” He sat down. She offered her hand and he shook it lightly, his fingers pressing against her rings.

It was a good one. Larry met Neil Diamond, also Robbie Robertson, also Richard Perry. He got mention on the album’s inner sleeve and got paid union scale.

… his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twenty-fourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twenty-seventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty-eighth, and finally Pat …

Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased.” The names reeled in Stu’s head. Chris the bartender.

… At the age of nine, Stu had gone to work, first for Rog Tucker, who owned the Red Ball, helping to unload trucks after school for thirty-five cents an hour, and then at the stockyards …

… “Roger, go tell Whitney or Stephanie-Ann to rustle this man up some fries and a couple of hamburgers. Naw, shit, what am I thinking about? He’ll ralph all over the place. Soup. Get him some soup.

… “Master Tech Sergeant Roger Petersen, front n center, puh-leeze!” A man in the audience began to howl and made an abortive dive for the back doors. Seconds later he was up on stage.

… I, Brother Zeno, until moments ago Sergeant First Class Roland Gibbs, proclaim myself first President of the Republic of Northern California! We are in control! We are in control! If your officers in the field try to countermand my orders, …

“That ole boy Rolf Dannemont would probably drag out his Remington and let daylight through me.” “I’d guess the total American population might be down to 1.6 million by next spring—and that’s a kind estimate.

“A lady named Rona Hewett. She walked most of the way here from Laramie, Wyoming, and Dick says she was ripe for a bug.” Fran nodded.

… “... occasion of your one hundredth birthday ... one of seventy-two proven centenarians in the United States of America ... fifth oldest registered Republican in the United States of America ... greetings and congratulations from President Ronald Reagan, January 14, 1982.”

… “From what Ronnie wrote in his letters, you didn’t miss much,” she said, and Zellman went away beaming broadly. The others came up to make their manners as the other parties had done before them, …

… her father “had a stick up his ass” about Ronnie, her boyfriend who had left town to join the Marines; she had plans to become either a beautician in Wichita when she graduated high school, …

… “And once,” Dayna said, “when she couldn’t hold on until it was time for one of them to take her into the bushes, Ronnie wiped her ass with a handful of barbed wire. She bled from her rectum for three days.”

… It was obvious that many of the others—Lloyd, Hank Rawson, Ronnie Sykes, the Rat-Man—saw him as a kind of mascot, a good luck charm. One of his arms was a horrid mass of freshly healed burn tissue, …

… A woman named Rose Kingman claimed to have seen him snap his fingers at a number of crows sitting on a telephone wire, and the crows fluttered down onto his shoulders, this Rose Kingman said, …

“It’s Mr. Brannigan’s, isn’t it?” Roy Brannigan was a local realtor. “It was,” Harold said indifferently.

… Behind him, walking in line like a solemn undertaker’s party, were three men: Whitney Horgan, carrying a large carpetbag; a man named Roy Hoopes, with a stepladder; and Winky Winks, a bald man whose eyes twitched constantly.

… Her last remark to him as he and Rudy Schwartz drove off in Rudy’s old Ford was that they had poorhouses in California, too. Yessir, that’s my mamma. “Do you want to stay here, Larry?” she asked softly.

A man named Rudy Sparkman came to help me. I was very lucky to have him. In 1984 the orphanage went broke.

… She and her two girlfriends, Ruth Honinger and Mary Beth Gooch, went to all the rock concerts in Wichita and had hitched all the way to Kansas City last September to see Van Halen and the Monsters of Heavy Metal in concert.

… Well, why would Ruthie Sears want to push you down? ... Yes, it is nasty. Very nasty scrape. But it goes good with the color of your dress, don’t you think?

… Sal Doria going out, saying: If this is what it does to guys like you, Larry, I wish you were still playing sessions. He opened his eyes and turned away from the overpass, looking for a cab.

… “Wake up now, Sally.” A louder mutter: leeme lone. He shook her harder. “Wake up. You got to wake up!” Charlie. Charlie’s voice. Calling her. For how long? Sally swam up out of sleep.

… only Sally Elbert had fled screaming into the night with five-year-old Donald (later to be known as the Trashcan Man) in her arms. Wendell Elbert had stood on the front steps, shooting at them as they fled, …

… Dear Norm, Sally Hodges says she needs somebody to sit her kids this morning and says shell give me a dolar. Ill be back for luntch. Theres sassage if you want it. I love you honey. Lila.

… Sally Vollman had gotten sick. They camped for two days, waiting helplessly for her to get better or die. She had died. Dick Vollman was still with them, but he was a different man—silent, thoughtful, pale.

… The bicycle trip Jesse and I took to Rangely in May with Sam Lothrop and Sally Wenscelas. The biology final I lucked out on. Peggy Tate’s (another high school friend and mutual aquaintance) new job as a Senate page.

… money paid to him by Sam Freemantle of Lewis, South Carolina, as wages for the eight years her daddy and his brothers had stayed on after the States War had ended—had been “conscience money.”

… The bicycle trip Jesse and I took to Rangely in May with Sam Lothrop and Sally Wenscelas. The biology final I lucked out on. Peggy Tate’s (another high school friend and mutual aquaintance) new job as a Senate page.

… Sam Tauber was five and a half years old. His mother had died on June the twenty-fourth in the Murfreesboro, Georgia, General Hospital. On the twenty-fifth, his father and younger sister, two-year-old April, had died.

… Sarah went home to infect her husband and his five poker buddies and her teenaged daughter, Samantha. Unknown to her parents, Samantha was terribly afraid she had caught a dose of the clap from her boyfriend.

… The last of her brothers, Luke, had died in 1949, at the age of eighty something, and the last of her children, Samuel, in 1974, at the age of fifty-four. She had outlived all of her children, …

… “You did that, Sandy!” Rachel accused. “I did not!” “Shhhh!” The board quivered again and the girls hushed. It moved, stopped, moved again. It made the letter F. “Fuh ...” the girl named Sandy said.

… A Census Committee was voted routinely with Sandy DuChiens in charge. She and her four helpers immediately began going through the audience, counting heads, taking names. At the end of the meeting, to the accompaniment of tremendous cheers, …

… This matronly woman was Mrs. Robert Bradford, Sarah Bradford to the bridge club, Cookie to her husband and close friends. Sarah played well that night, possibly because her partner was Angela Dupray, her best friend.

… 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.

… Get these right down to the crime lab, Sergeant Briggs. I think our killer has finally made a mistake. Right-o, Inspector Underwood. The day Scotland Yard decided to send you was a lucky day for Squinchly-on-the-Green.

… “I’m Sheldon Jones,” a big man in a wool-plaid shirt said. “Why don’t we just go ahead and get two new ones tonight? I nom’nate Ted Frampton over there.” “Hey, I second that!” Bill Scanlon yelled.

… Hey, Trash, Sheriff Greeley cut your old man down just like a mad dog, you know that, ya fuckin weirdo? His father had been in O’Toole’s and there was some bad talk, …

… Written across the top of each notesheet was MEMO and From The Desk Of Sheriff John Baker. Nick turned the pad around and tapped the pencil eraser at the name. He raised questioning eyebrows. “Yeah, that’s me. Who are you?”

… Sheriff John Stoner was having problems with the rowdier element in the town of Roaring Rock, Wyoming, it seemed—and, worse, he just couldn’t find anything to give his lovely young wife for Christmas. Fran had gone away more optimistic, …

… After a few moments there was a click and then Shirley Dunbar’s Tennessee twang was in his ear: “Operator.” “Hi, Shirley, it’s Lloyd.” “Lloyd Henreid! How are ya?” “Not too bad, Shirl. Can you try 6214 for me?”

… She was halfway home when she met Shirley Hammett, the older woman that had been traveling with Dayna, Susan, and Patty Kroger. Shirley had improved strikingly since then. Now she looked like a brisk and pretty matron-about-town.

Seventeen. So if you—” “Yeah, that’s what Shockley said,” Mathers said.

A Smith. A Rennett. And a great many others.

Lloyd asked. “Yes. Stan Bailey and I were going over a work rotation program.” “See if you’ve got anything on a guy named Tom Cullen, would you?”

… when I had this idea, I asked Stan Nogotny if he would try to hypnotize Tom. Stan used to do it as a parlor trick at parties sometimes, I heard him say.

… Only Stan Norris, age nine, still felt good enough to fidget. During their wait in Sweeney’s office they communicated the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips to more than twenty-five people, …

So he had gotten up this morning at first light after a mostly sleepless night (the thought that played over and over in his mind was: Jeff-Marty-Helen-Harriett-Bill-George-Junior-Robert-Stanley-Richard-Danny-Frank-Patty-and-I-thought-she-was-getting-better) and put on his sweatsuit.

… the problem he’d had Steffens run through the main computer bank (Steffens had looked at him as though he were crazy, and yes, Starkey thought he might be) was: How long could that centrifuge be expected to run?

… “Roger, go tell Whitney or Stephanie-Ann to rustle this man up some fries and a couple of hamburgers. Naw, shit, what am I thinking about? He’ll ralph all over the place. Soup. Get him some soup.

… Judy had also allowed Steve Phillips and Mark Collins to “work their will” on her; they were both on the Milltown High football team (the Milltown Cougars, to be exact, fight-fight-fight-fight-for-the-dear-blue-and-white) and she was a cheerleader.

… 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, …

… “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Stuart Redman, originally from Arnette, Texas, although that seems a far way down the road from where I am now, lemme tell you.”

The girl in the Kent State sweatshirt was Susan Stern. A third woman, the one who had squeezed Shotgun’s crotch, was Patty Kroger.

… But when Christopher and Susy came and said they wanted to get her on the city water, she had turned them down just as she had turned down Molly and Jim on their kind offer of a flushing toilet.

… SERGEANT T.L. PETERS STATIONED CARTHAGE MO. ON EMERGENCY DUTY SPRINGFIELD MO. APPARENTLY ASSASSINATED BY OWN MEN XXXX OTHER INCIDENTS OF SIMILAR NATURE POSSIBLE BUT UNCONFIRMED SITUATION DETERIORATING RAPIDLY XXXXX COMMUNICATION ENDS GARFIELD ZONE 6 LITTLE ROCK …

It was given by a man named Ted Enslin. The place was packed. Everyone was listening very solemnly ... very carefully ... so as not to miss a word.

… They were supposed to replace Nick Andros with Ted Frampton? It was like one of those sick jokes. Ted had tried the Power Committee and had found it too much like work. He had drifted over to the Burial Committee …

… Teddy Weizak or Norris could drop him off on the way home. He set off, zipping his light jacket all the way to his chin against the chill that would be gone in an hour or so.

… “They call me The Kid. Outta Shreveport, Looseyanna. You know that? This here beast won every major carshow award in the South. You believe that happy crappy?” Trashcan Man said he did and got another warm beer.

… The Pokeno Killer, as he had been called, had apparently opted out with his belt, or if they had taken that, his own pair of pants. Later that night, after the lights had come on automatically, …

… It had been built in 1889 by Carla’s grandfather, Tobias Downes, and it had ascended to family heirloom status almost immediately, shifting down through the years, carefully packed and insured for moves …

“Laws, yes. Tom Cullen knows what that means.” His bike was leaning against the pink stucco wall of the apartment building.

… “She finally agreed to let Tom Edmonton take a look at her.” “Has he been yet?” “He just left. He thinks she’s got the flu.” “Oh, Lord,” Frannie said, closing her eyes.

… Norman Bruett and Tommy Wannamaker, who had both worked in the paper factory, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago. Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant …

… 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.

… This buddy of mine back in Arnette, Tony Leominster, he had one in his Scout. Great gadget. You could talk to folks, or you could holler for help if you got in a jam of trouble.

… The man in the cell on Lloyd’s right, Trask, had pointed out that most of the guards sounded pretty snotty themselves. Maybe we can get something outta this, Trask said. What? Lloyd had asked.

… Ed and his wife Trish marveled over southern hospitality while the three kids colored in the back seat. Christ only knew, Ed thought, what Carella’s pair of monsters would have been up to.

… What must your Uncle Andrew and Aunt Carlene think? You embarrassed me half to death! The parlor was where you were tongue-tied, the parlor was where you itched and couldn’t scratch, …

… 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 …

… The male nurse—Vic, Stu remembered, his name is Vic—began to cough again. “Jesus,” Vic said. “Jesus, what are you doing out? You’re not supposed to be out.”

Vic Hammer was ... had been ... his son-in-law. How was he supposed to tell Cynthia about this? I’m sorry, Cindy. Vic took a high dive into a cold bowl of soup today.

… she walked slowly around to the privy her grandson Victor had put behind the house in 1931. She went inside, primly shut the door and put the hook through the eye …

… Victor Palfrey was retired and smoked stinking home-rolled cigarettes, which were all he could afford. “Now what I say is this,” Hap told them, putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward.

… Vincent Hogan and Billy Warner were in the two Saltine-box cells on Nick’s left. Mike Childress was in one of the two on the right. The other was empty and it was empty because Ray Booth, …

… Doc and Virge were the only two scatterees, as a matter of fact, and that was when they had begun their new lives as zoo-keepers. Garvey had come along on the first of July, and Ronnie on the third.

… for the life of her she couldn’t remember why she had allowed Waldo—Waldo Horton, what a yuck name—to “work his will” on her. And if she was going to be knocked up, why did it have to be him?

… He got three of the Tattered Remnants—Barry Grieg, Al Spellman, and Johnny McCall—and two other musicians he had worked with in the past, Neil Goodman and Wayne Stukey. They cut the album in nine days, …

… Wendell Elbert had a gun and he murdered the bartender with it, then went home and murdered Trashcan’s two older brothers and his sister with it—oh, Wendell Elbert was a strange fellow with a badass temper …

… “Wes and me, we had to get married,” Lucy said. “That was the summer after I graduated high school—1984. My mom and dad didn’t want me to marry him.

… Whitney Horgan, who was one damned fine cook, had served something that looked like dog food and was too burned to taste like much of anything. The Judge was dead, but something had gone wrong.

One of them was Will Ronson, the man who runs the drugstore.

… Poker games at Ralph Hodges’s house and Willy Craddock always complaining about how he was four dollars in the game, even if he was twenty ahead. Six or seven of them pushing Tony Leominster’s Scout back onto the road …

… and Winky Winks, a bald man whose eyes twitched constantly. Winky was carrying a clipboard with a typed sheet of paper on it. Heck was dragged to the foot of the cross.

… He met Yvonne Wetterlen at a movie theater two blocks from the club where she worked as a topless dancer. When the second show let out, she had been weeping and searching around her seat on the aisle for her purse.