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Dataset card Data Studio Files
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The Eye appraised them coldly. They were coming. For reasons he could not fathom, they were actually coming. Nadine had told the truth.
There was a low growling, and the Eye turned in another direction. There was a dog on the far side of the campfire, its head lowered, its tail coiled down and over its privates. Its eyes glowed like baleful amber gems. Its growl was a constant thing, like endlessly ripping cloth. The Eye stared at it, and the dog stare...
One of the forms rose to a sitting position. “Kojak,” it mumbled. “Will you for Chrissakes shut up?”
Kojak continued to growl, his hackles up.
The man who had awakened—it was Glen Bateman—looked around, suddenly uneasy. “Who’s there, boy?” he whispered to the dog. “Is something there?”
Kojak continued to growl.
“Stu!” He shook the form next to him. The form muttered something and was silent again in its sleeping bag.
The dark man who was now the dark Eye had seen enough. He whirled upward, catching just a glimpse of the dog’s neck craning up to follow him. The low growl turned into a volley of barks, loud at first, then fading, fading, gone.
Silence and rushing darkness.
Some unknown time later he paused over the desert floor, looking down at himself. He sank slowly, approaching the body, then sinking into himself. For a moment there was a curious sensation of vertigo, of two things merging into one. Then the Eye was gone and there were only his eyes, staring up at the cold and gleamin...
They were coming, yes.
Flagg smiled. Had the old woman told them to come? Would they listen to her if she, on her deathbed, instructed them to commit suicide in that novel way? He supposed it was possible that they would.
What he had forgotten was so staggeringly simple that it was humbling: They were having their problems too, they were frightened too… and as a result, they were making a colossal mistake.
Was it even possible that they had been turned out?
He lingered lovingly over the idea but in the end could not quite believe it. They were coming of their own choice. They were coming wrapped in righteousness like a clutch of missionaries approaching the cannibals’ village.
Oh, it was so lovely!
Doubts would end. Fears would end. All it would take was the sight of their four heads up on spikes in front of the MGM Grand’s fountain. He would assemble every person in Vegas and make them file past and look. He would have photographs taken, would print fliers, have them sent out to LA and San Francisco and Spokane ...
Five heads. He would put the dog’s head up on a pole, too.
“Good doggy,” Flagg said, and laughed aloud for the first time since Nadine had goaded him into throwing her off the roof. “Good doggy,” he said again, grinning.
He slept well that night, and in the morning he sent out word that the watch on the roads between Utah and Nevada was to be tripled. They were no loner looking for one man going east but four men and a dog going west. And they were to be taken alive. Taken alive at all costs.
Oh, yes.
Chapter 72
“You know,” Glen Bateman said, looking out toward Grand Junction in the early light of morning, “I’ve heard the saying ‘That sucks’ for years without really being sure of what it meant. Now I think I know.” He looked down at his breakfast, which consisted of Morning Star Farms synthetic sausage links, and grimaced.
“No, this is good,” Ralph said earnestly. “You should have had some of the chow we had in the army.”
They were sitting around the campfire, which Larry had rekindled an hour earlier. They were all dressed in warm coats and gloves, and all were on their second cups of coffee. The temperature was about thirty-five degrees, and the sky was cloudy and bleak. Kojak was napping as close to the fire as he could get without s...
“I’m done feeding the inner man,” Glen said, getting up. “Give me your poor, your hungry. On second thought, just give me your garbage. I’ll bury it.”
Stu handed him his paper plate and cup. “This walkin’s really something, isn’t it, baldy? I bet you ain’t been in this good shape since you were twenty.”
“Yeah, seventy years ago,” Larry said, and laughed.
“Stu, I was never in this kind of shape,” Glen said grimly, picking up litter and popping it into the plastic sack he intended to bury. “I never wanted to be in this kind of shape. But I don’t mind. After fifty years of confirmed agnosticism, it seems to be my fate to follow an old black woman’s God into the jaws of de...
They watched him walk to the edge of the camp with a small entrenching tool. This “walking tour of Colorado and points west,” as Glen put it, had been the hardest on Glen himself. He was the oldest, Ralph Brentner’s senior by twelve years. But somehow he had eased it considerably for the others. His irony was constant ...
“Hurt bad?” Stu had asked him yesterday, about an hour after they had moved out.
“Aspirin takes care of it. It’s arthritis, you know, but it’s not as bad as it’s apt to be in another five or seven years, and frankly, East Texas, I’m not looking that far ahead.”
“You really think he’s going to take us?”
And Glen Bateman had said a peculiar thing: “I will fear no evil.” And that had been the end of the discussion.
Now they heard him digging at the frozen soil and cursing it.
“Quite a fella, ain’t he?” Ralph said.
Larry nodded. “Yes. I think he is.”
“I always thought those college teachers was sissies, but that man sure ain’t. Know what he said when I asked him why he didn’t just throw that crap to one side of the road? Said we didn’t need to start up that kind of shit again. Said we’d started up too many of the old brands of shit already.”
Kojak got up and trotted over to see what Glen was doing. Glen’s voice floated over to them: “Well, there you are, you big lazy turd. I was starting to wonder where you’d gotten off to. Want me to bury you too?”
Larry grinned and took off the mileometer clipped to his belt. He had picked it up in a Golden sports supply shop. You set it according to the length of your stride and then clipped it to your belt like a carpenter’s rule. Each evening he wrote down how far they had walked that day on a dog-eared and often-folded sheet...
“Can I see that cheat sheet?” Stu asked.
“Sure,” Larry said, and handed it over.
At the top of the sheet Larry had printed: Boulder to Vegas: 771 miles. Below that:
Date
September 6th
September 7th
September 8th
September 9th