Datasets:
BlinAI
/
Testo

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
 Community
1
text
stringlengths
0
4.23k
The Judge, with his head blown off.
The girl, who had eluded him at the last second. And she had known, Goddammit! She had known!
He threw a sudden furious stare at the wolves and nearly half a dozen fell to fighting, their guttural sounds like ripping cloth in the stillness.
He knew all their secrets except… the third. Who was the third? He had sent the Eye out over and over again, and it afforded him with nothing but the cryptic, idiotic face of the moon. M-O-O-N, that spells moon.
Who was the third?
How had the girl been able to escape him? He had been taken utterly by surprise, left with nothing but a handful of her blouse. He had known about her knife, that had been child’s play, but not about that sudden leap at the window-wall. And the coldblooded way she had taken her own life, without a moment’s hesitation. ...
His thoughts chased each other like weasels in the dark.
Things were getting just a trifle flaky around the edges. He didn’t like it.
Lauder, for instance. There was Lauder.
He had performed so excellently, like one of those little wind-up toys with a key sticking out of its back. Go here. Go there. Do this. Do that. But the dynamite bomb had only gotten two of them—all that planning, all that effort spoiled by that dying old nigger woman’s return. And then… after Harold had been disposed ...
Who, if not his son?
The rabbit was done. He slipped it off the spit and onto his tin plate.
“All right, all you asshole gyrenes, chow down!”
That made him grin right out loud. Had he been a Marine once? He thought so. Strictly the Parris Island variety, though. There had been a kid, a defective, name of Boo Dinkway. They had…
What?
Flagg frowned down at his messkit. Had they beaten ole Boo into the ground with those padded poles? Scragged him somehow? He seemed to remember something about gasoline. But what?
In a sudden rage, he almost slung the freshly cooked rabbit into the fire. He should be able to remember that, goddammit!
“Chow down, grunts,” he whispered, but this time there was only a whiff of memory lane.
He was losing himself. Once he had been able to look back over the sixties, seventies, and eighties like a man looking down a double flight of stairs leading into a darkened room. Now he could only clearly remember the events since the superflu. Beyond that there was nothing but a haze that would sometimes lift a tiny ...
The earliest memory he could now be sure of was of walking south on US 51, heading toward Mountain City and the home of Kit Bradenton.
Of being born. Born again.
He was no longer strictly a man, if he had ever been one. He was like an onion, slowly peeling away one layer at a time, only it was the trappings of humanity that seemed to be peeling away: organized reflection, memory, possibly even free will… if there ever had been such a thing.
He began to eat the rabbit.
Once, he was quite sure, he would have done a quick fade when things began to get flaky. Not this time. This was his place, his time, and he would take his stand here. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t yet been able to uncover the third spy, or that Harold had gotten out of control at the end and had had the colossal eff...
Somewhere that strange Trashcan Man was in the desert, sniffing out the weapons which would eradicate the troublesome, worrisome Free Zone forever. His Eye could not follow the Trashcan Man, and in some ways Flagg thought that Trash was stranger than he was himself, a kind of human bloodhound who sniffed cordite and na...
In a month or less, the National Guard jets would be flying, with a full complement of Shrike missiles tucked under their wings. And when he was sure that the bride had conceived, they would fly east.
He looked dreamily up at the basketball moon and smiled.
There was one other possibility. He thought the Eye would show him, in time. He might go there, possibly as a crow, possibly as a wolf, possibly as an insect—a praying mantis, perhaps, something small enough to squirm through a carefully concealed vent cap in the middle of a spiky patch of desert grass. He would hop or...
The place was underground. Just over the border and into California.
There were beakers there, rows and rows of beakers, each with its own neat Dymo tape identifying it: a super cholera, a super anthrax, a new and improved version of the bubonic plague, all of them based on the shifting-antigen ability that had made the superflu so almost universally deadly. There were hundreds of them ...
How about a little in your water, Free Zone?
How about a nice airburst?
Some lovely Legionnaires’ disease for Christmas, or would you rather have the new and improved Swine flu?
Randy Flagg, the dark Santa, in his National Guard sleigh, with a little virus to drop down every chimney?
He would wait, and he would know the right time when it came round at last.
Something would tell him.
Things were going to be fine. No quick fade this time. He was on top and he was going to stay there.
The rabbit was gone. Full of hot food, he felt himself again. He stood, tin plate in hand, and slung the bones out into the night. The wolves charged at them, fought over them, growling and biting and snarling, their eyes rolling blankly in the moonlight.
Flagg stood, hands on his hips, and roared laughter up at the moon.
Early the next morning Nadine left the town of Glendale and headed down I-15 on her Vespa. Her snow-white hair, unbound, trailed out behind her, looking very much like a bridal train.
She felt sorry for the Vespa, which had served her so long and faithfully and which was now dying. Mileage and desert heat, the laborious crossing of the Rockies, and indifferent maintenance had all taken their toll. The engine now sounded horse and laboring. The RPM needle had begun to shudder instead of remaining doc...
Harold had shot at her! Harold had tried to kill her!
Her mind kept returning to that no matter how she tried to avoid it. Her mind worried it like a dog worrying a bone. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Flagg had come to her in a dream that first night after the explosion, when Harold finally allowed them to camp. He told her that he was going to leave Harold with her ...
But it hadn’t been quick and painless, and Harold had almost killed her. The bullet had droned past within an inch of her cheek and still she had been unable to move. She had been frozen in shock, wondering how he could have done such a thing, how he could have been allowed to even try such a thing.
She had tried to rationalize it by telling herself it was Flagg’s way of throwing a scare into her, of reminding her who it was she belonged to. But it made no sense! It was crazy! Even if it had made some sort of sense, there was a firm, knowing voice inside her which said the shooting incident had just been something...
She tried to push the voice away, to bar the door against it the way a sane person will bar the door against an undesirable person with murder in his or her eyes. But she couldn’t do it. The voice told her she was alive through blind chance now. That Harold’s bullet could just as easily have gone between her eyes, and ...
She called the voice a liar. Flagg knew everything, where the smallest sparrow had fallen—
No, that’s God, the voice replied implacably. God, he’s not. You’re alive through blind chance, and that means that all bets are off. You owe him nothing. You can turn around and go back, if you want to.
Go back, that was a laugh. Go back where?
The voice had little to say on that subject; she would have been surprised if it did. If the dark man’s feet were made of clay, she had discovered the fact just a little late.