They are behind the wing of a small jet. The sun is setting. Agent Nancy walks to the plane, confers with the pilot. The other agents hold Felix and the Prophet in place behind the van. The Prophet is watching the horizon. Ash falls on his face. Standing close to him, Felix can hear that he’s humming low in his throat. He is stunned by the ochre of the air.
“Why is the sky orange?” he asks, but no one answers.
Could this be the apocalypse?
He has no idea that California, Arizona, and New Mexico are burning. No idea that paramilitary groups have moved on thirty-nine state houses.
He thinks of his sister. How close they were to saving her. Unless. Unless she was already gone. Of course. It was an ambush. Somehow Mobley and Bathsheba got out. Somehow even though they were watching.
A sound reaches them then. The roar of heavy trucks accelerating and then a crash, followed by gunfire. The agents flinch, ducking instinctually, heads turning. Two panel trucks have broken through the front gate. Soldiers at the gate fire at them, but the back doors of the trucks roll up. There’s some kind of heavy machine gun mounted inside. The trucks return fire.
The agents scramble. They shove Felix and the Prophet back into the van, slam the doors. With the engine off, it’s dark inside. Felix lies on the floor, facedown, hands cuffed behind his back. The Prophet lies on top of him. There is a feeling in Felix’s heart, a profound sense of disorientation, as if the world as he knows it has changed into something unrecognizable. Something foreign. Something insane.
This is it. The day the threads are pulled, and the garment falls apart.
12. A Scout Is Reverent
Gunfire then, close by. It booms through the van as the agents shoot back. And then return fire, a series of metal punches as bullets rip through the van above them.
pop pop pop pop
Felix tries to duck, but he’s already on the floor. Above him the Prophet continues to hum. Felix hears the sound of the plane’s engines cycling up. Either Agent Nancy is trying to make a break for it, or the pilots are moving the plane out of danger. More bullets hit the van.
pop pop pop pop
Felix hears a grunt from outside and what sounds like a body bounce off the paneling. The return gunfire stops. Above him, the Prophet stops humming.
“It’s up to you,” he says directly into Felix’s ear. “You have to save us now.”
Book 5
The Unconformity
Boogaloo II
Randall Flagg wakes to the sound of screams. It’s daytime, but the hospital blinds are drawn. The door to the hall is open and Flagg sees an orderly rush by, pushing a gurney. For a moment he wonders if the scream was real or in a dream, but then he hears it again. A wail of anguish. And then a gunshot. Boom. Flagg looks for the state trooper, but the trooper is gone, his sports page scattered across the floor.
He knows without knowing that the switch has flipped. The Big Igloo is finally here. The hospital is under siege, the whole state maybe, even the country.
Flagg wastes no time on shock. He has been in this situation before and understands on a fundamental level that unthinkable things happen every day. He struggles to sit up. There is pain in his side, but it’s manageable. He is blind in one eye, but that too is manageable. His right hand is cuffed to the plastic rail of the bed. There is an IV line in that arm, rubber tubing running to a saline bag on a stand. EKG monitors dot his chest and belly.
Boom, another shot, getting closer. To Flagg it sounds like the low roar of a shotgun. Because there is no ratchet between shots, he thinks, it must be a high-capacity tactical shotgun. He pulls the IV needle from his arm, but he doesn’t discard it. Instead, he tugs hard, tipping the IV stand onto the bed. For ten seconds he considers trying to use the IV needle to pick the lock on the handcuff, but a one-pin lockpick takes time, and from the sound of the shot he has none.
He throws the covers off the bed, examines the rail of the bed, looking for a weak point. It’s solid state, maybe four feet wide and two feet tall, made of thick plastic without visible joints. But because it can be raised and lowered it must have a joint somewhere, a weak connection. He gets to his knees, hospital gown open in the back, and lifts the metal IV stand off the floor with his left hand, short sleeved by the handcuff on his right wrist.
Boom.
Adrenaline races through his veins and he thinks: I am Randall Flagg, the Walking Dude, the Ageless Stranger, who can call beast and fowl alike to my defense, who haunts the dreams of mortal men. Randall Flagg, the Man in Black, Old Creeping Judas, the Grinning Man. Only an atom bomb can kill me.
He rears up and smashes the IV stand into the plastic arm, once, twice, three times, feeling the cuff bite into his right wrist, feeling his stitches pull in protest. The industrial plastic is tough, but Randall Flagg is a being of pure will. He hits it one more time and it snaps at the base but doesn’t fall.