“Palm Springs, huh?” says a voice from behind him.
Simon turns.
Randall Flagg leans in the open doorway, smoking a Newport. He is dressed in all black, with a shotgun slung around his body. There is a red bandanna tied over his left eye.
Simon can’t help himself. He throws himself into Randall’s arms, hugs him.
“Jesus, kid,” says the Walking Dude. “Ease up.”
Simon retreats, crying now, as much from confusion as from relief. The world has become a missile, moving too fast to steer. All you can do is hold on and pray. For the first time he wishes he were an adult, clear in himself, a man with experience and perspective, who has already made all his mistakes and learned from them. Instead, he is a beginning skier poised at the top of a mountain. He doesn’t know the terrain ahead, let alone how to turn, how to slalom, how to stop.
This will all make sense when I am older, he thinks, but even as he thinks it, he knows that no one in the history of humanity has ever been that old.
Randall comes in and closes the door.
“Which one of you motherfuckers has a plan?” he says.
*
They find a band saw in the Amazon truck and use it to cut a hole in the drywall that connects the pet store to the sporting goods store. Busting through the cinder block takes more effort, but they’re young and motivated, and Flagg finds some steel pipes in the back room, and they go to town, smashing, smashing, smashing. It feels good after everything they’ve been through. To whirl and swing, to jab and kick. On snack breaks they compare their wounds—physical, emotional. Everyone agrees that Flagg, with half a liver and a missing eye is the winner, although when Simon describes his and Story’s ordeal with the Witch, the room gets quiet.
Louise starts to shiver.
Avon is touch and go, they figure, and Samson sits with him while the others work, not sure what to feel. He has lost so much already, has renounced his father and changed his name, and yet here he is, the old man, like a thought you don’t want but have to face. The Prophet would say that God brought Avon to him so they could heal their old wounds, but Samson isn’t so sure. Sometimes, he thinks, the world is just a fucked-up, random place, where everything happens and nothing makes sense.
We make our own meaning.
Simon is the first through the wall. The sporting goods store has been ransacked pretty well in the last few days—not looted, just shopped out. The gun racks are empty, bullets sold, but not all the shelves are empty, and they stock up on what they think they might need, or what seems funny in the moment. At first Louise refuses to make the pilgrimage to Angel’s Sporting Goods. Her logic is that God gave them everything they could need when he delivered them the truck. But then the Prophet suggests that maybe it was God who put a sporting goods store next to the pet store in the first place, and who are we to reject such a blessing, and Louise shrugs and climbs on through.
Later, Samson finds Story sitting by herself on the floor of the pet shop, her back to the wall. She has her hands pressed to the cold cement, needing to feel something physical, something real. He slides down beside her, careful not to get too close. In the back room, Simon told him what happened. The explosion at the Capitol. How her family is dead. His lies seem pathetic now in comparison to the magnitude of her grief.
They sit for a minute in silence.
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” she says, not looking at him. “I have to find Hadrian. But who do I call? The FBI? Social Services? Not that—I mean, the phone lines are down. He’s a twelve-year-old boy and the satellites, whatever, are screwed, because, I don’t know, the world is ending.”
He nods. “Whatever I can do,” he says. “I want to help.”
“No,” she says, “I think you’ve done enough.”
He thinks about that. The last thing she needs right now is for him to explain himself, to shift the focus, to say, I know your parents are dead, but let’s talk about my rough childhood. Let me tell you how hard I had it, so you’ll forgive me, and we can what—go back to the way it used to be?
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She nods.
“Do you want me to drive you to DC?”
She looks at him for the first time.
“Drive three thousand miles in the middle of a civil war?”
“If you want.”
“What about your sister?”
He thinks about that. “I’m trying to make things right,” he says.
“There is no right. Right is a fantasy.”