The Stand (Original Version) by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 9780307947307
Google: UbfnTcmkaKkC
Amazon: 0307743683
Goodreads: 149267
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 1978-09-30T07:00:00+00:00

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 but quite a bit above the town of Boulder proper, so that from the wide living room window the streets and roads of the municipality appeared spread out like a gigantic gameboard. That window was treated on the outside with some sort of silvery reflective stuff, so that the squire could look out but passersby could not look in. Nick guessed that the house was in the $150,000-$200,000 range ... and the owner and his family were mysteriously absent.

On his own long journey from Shoyo to Boulder, first by himself, then with Tom Cullen and the others, he had passed through tens of dozens of towns and cities, and all of them had been stinking charnel houses. Boulder had no business being any different ... but it was. There were corpses here, yes, thousands of them, and something was going to have to be done about them before the hot, dry days ended and the fall rains began, causing quicker decomposition and possible disease ... but there were not enough corpses. Nick wondered if anyone other than he and Stu Redman had noticed it ... Lauder, maybe. Lauder noticed almost everything.

For every house or public building you found littered with corpses, there were ten others completely empty. Sometime, during the last spasm of the plague, most of Boulder’s citizens, sick or well, had blown town. Why? Well, he supposed it really didn’t matter, and maybe they would never know. The awesome fact remained that Mother Abagail, sight unseen, had managed to lead them to maybe the one small city in the United States that had been cleared of plague victims. It was enough to make even an agnostic like himself wonder where she was getting her information.

He went back to his thoughts, doodling formlessly on a pad in front of him.

It seemed to him that all they wanted or needed from the old life was stored in the silent East Boulder power plant, like dusty treasure in a dark cupboard. An unpleasant feeling seemed to run through the people who had gathered in Boulder, a feeling just submerged below the surface—they were like a scared bunch of kids knocking around in the local haunted house after dark. There was a sense that being here in Boulder was strictly a temporary thing. There was one man, a fellow named Impening, who had lived in Boulder and worked on one of the custodial crews at the IBM plant out on the Boulder-Longmont Diagonal. Impening seemed determined to stir up unrest. He was going around telling people that in 1974 there had been an inch and a half of snow in Boulder by September 14, and that by November it would be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. That was the kind of talk Nick would like to put a quick stop to.

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