The Stand

Larry is sitting at the New York zoo, morosely watching the animals die from neglect as the city crumbles around him. He thinks back to his earlier years, regretting a lost love and a lost friendship. His mother died three days earlier, yet Larry is showing no plague symptoms at all. While at the zoo, he meets a wealthy woman named Rita Blakemoor, who is also showing no symptoms of the disease. The two strike up a conversation and then wander over to an abandoned restaurant where Larry cooks dinner for them both.

Frannie is back at her family home in Ogunquit, Maine. Both her parents are now dead. Since her father passed away only the previous day, Frannie needs to think about burying him. Her town is now hit with the same plague symptoms as the rest of the country, and the local residents have decided to seal the town off from the rest of the world. As Frannie is digging her father’s grave in the backyard, she receives a visit from a teenager named Harold Lauder. He’s driving a Cadillac and proposes that Frannie go away with him since neither of them has any symptoms of the disease. Frannie says she’ll think about it and tells Harold to leave.

She then continues the painful process of shrouding her father’s body, dragging it downstairs, and burying him in the garden. Later that night, she has a dream similar to the one experienced by Stu and Nick. “Something—someone—filled with dark life and hideous good cheer was under there, and it would be more than her life was worth to pull that tablecloth back, but she … couldn’t … stop her feet” (306).

The plague facility in Vermont is nearly deserted. Stu fears that Elder, one of the remaining doctors, has received orders to kill him. He has now become a loose end because no one has yet been able to figure out why Stu isn’t ill, and it no longer matters since the country is falling into chaos. When Elder arrives to examine him, Stu wrests the gun away from the doctor and shoots him.

Stu wends his way through the facility’s maze, finding dead and dying staff everywhere. Eventually, he manages to get a clear view of the outside. “The top half of this second door was clear glass reinforced with crisscrossed safety wire. Beyond it was only the night, the beautiful mellow summer night, and all the freedom a man ever dreamed of” (315). Stu weeps with relief when he emerges alive.

The town to which the Campions drove in their initial flight from the plague is now a ghost town. Nothing remains alive, except some species of wildlife and cats, which are immune to the disease. “The sun deserted Arnette; the town grew dark under the wing of the night. The town was, except for the chirr and whisper of small animals and the tinkle of Tony Leominster’s wind chimes, silent. And silent. And silent” (318).

Kit Bradenton of Mountain City, Colorado, is delirious as he suffers through the last stages of the plague. He fears the arrival of the man he calls the Walkin Dude. Kit has become a servant of sorts and promised to provide the dark man with what he needs for his journey. The Walkin Dude arrives and intrudes into Kit’s delirium, asking for papers and a car.

Kit says he has forged identity papers in the name of Randall Flagg and that a 1975 Buick is waiting at the Conoco station south of town with registration papers inside. Flagg is pleased. He snaps his fingers, and Kit magically disappears. “Flagg laughed aloud, heartily, the laugh of a man with nothing on his mind but lots of good things. Where the Conoco’s tarmac became highway, he turned right and began to run south” (326).

On June 29, Lloyd is sitting in his cell in Phoenix and fretting. He hasn’t seen his lawyer for three days, and the court system is in shambles because so many judges and jurors are out sick. As the days pass, the number of guards in the cell block decreases. Other prisoners die off, one by one. The inmates don’t receive meals any longer. Lloyd has begun conserving his food just in case. He works loose the leg of his cot to bang on the bars, hoping for attention. He also uses the cot leg as a weapon to kill a rat that has begun feeding on corpses. Lloyd puts the rat’s remains under his bed, just in case he needs to eat it later.

Nick has taken up residence in the town jail in Arkansas. Most of the rest of the small town is now dead, and electrical power cuts off just as Nick is reading a novel at 9:00 pm. At that moment, one of Nick’s assailants enters the jail. Ray Booth was never captured with the other three. Now plague-ridden, Ray is determined to kill the deaf-mute before he dies himself.

The two men struggle. Ray first tries to choke and then blind Nick, but the younger man gets control of a pistol and shoots Ray instead. Afterward, Nick kicks the corpse and thinks:

You fixed me, he told the dead man. First my teeth and now my eye. Are you happy? You would have taken both eyes if you could have done it, wouldn’t you? Taken my eyes and left me deaf, dumb, and blind in a world of the dead (340).

Donald Merwin Elbert is a schizophrenic living on the streets of Powtanville, Indiana, where he’s known to locals as Trashcan Man because he lights fires in people’s trashcans. His town is empty now like all the rest, and Trashcan Man takes the highway east out of town toward the Cheery Oil Company storage tanks. The company, too, is empty, so Trash climbs to the top of storage tank no. 1. He lights a match over a gasoline leak and waits for the explosion to follow.

Although he intended to incinerate himself along with the oil tanks, Trash has a new thought. He’s exempt from the plague for some unknown reason. Perhaps he has a greater purpose. Hastily, he rushes down the tank stairs, narrowly escaping the blaze that engulfs the entire property. He thinks, “There were bigger and better fires ahead. His eyes were soft and joyful and utterly crazy. They were the eyes of a man who has discovered the great axle of his destiny and has laid his hands upon it” (354).

Larry and Rita are carrying on a relationship against the backdrop of a dying city. There’s no longer electricity, which means high rise living will soon be impossible. Rita says she wants to escape New York, and Larry notices the strain getting to her. “With her, it was as if some internal crystal had shattered in the last twenty hours or so” (356). The two decide to supply themselves with backpacks, a stock of food, water, and weapons before heading out. Then they begin to walk. Larry says, “Being in New York was like being in a graveyard where the dead were not yet quiet. The sooner they got out, the better it would be” (366).

After several blocks, Rita’s feet begin to bleed because her shoes are completely impractical for hiking. Larry becomes angry at Rita’s thoughtlessness, and she runs away from his outburst. After searching for her, Larry gives up and continues through the Lincoln Tunnel alone. He finds a horror show inside. Stalled cars, and the people who walked away from them have all died. At one point, Larry needs to scale a mound of corpses. When he hears a noise behind him, he begins shooting, only to discover Rita trying to catch up. The two continue their journey and finally make it to the Jersey side of the tunnel. Everyone around them is dead.