The Stand

The following evening, in Arnette, Texas, five men are passing the time at the local Texaco station owned by Bill Hapscomb, who is known as “Hap.” His friends are Hank Carmichael, Stu Redmond, Vic Palfrey, Norm Bruett, and Tommy Wannamaker. They watch in fascination as a late model Chevy winds down the road toward the station at 15 miles an hour before colliding with a gas pump. They pull the car’s occupants out. The woman and child are dead, and the driver is still barely alive. Identified finally as Charlie Campion, he dies on the way to the local hospital.

In Ogunquit, Maine, 21-year-old Frannie Goldsmith goes to the town dock to tell her boyfriend, Jesse Rider, that she’s pregnant. He reacts badly to the news but proposes marriage. Frannie insists that she doesn’t want to marry him, and they part angrily.

The morning after the car accident. Norm Bruett develops a cold. Norm’s wife has left for the day to babysit three neighbor kids. She is beginning to cough and sneeze. The youngest of her babysitting charges coughs up phlegm. At the Texaco station, Hap is also feeling throat congestion. Hap’s cousin, Joe Bob Brentwood, is a state trooper, and he swings by to break the news that the hospital called the Plague Center in Atlanta after autopsying the Campion bodies. Joe Bob suggests that Hap should shut down the Texaco station just in case.

An army officer named Major William Starkey is checking paperwork on something called Project Blue, which is a government experiment to create a deadly virus to use for biological warfare. Somehow, the virus leaked into the ventilation system at the research facility on the night of 6/13/1990. An electronic monitor was supposed to detect air quality and seal off the facility in the event of contamination. A few seconds after the signal clock turned red, Charlie Campion noticed the warning and bolted before the base locked down.

The Plague Center in Atlanta traced the spread of the disease to Charlie’s escape. His exposure to the men at the Texaco station subsequently infected them. Starkey learns of the deadly consequence:

99.4% excess mortality, because the human body couldn’t produce the antibodies necessary to stop a constantly shifting antigen virus. Every time the body did produce the right antibody, the virus simply shifted to a slightly new form. For the same reason a vaccine was going to be almost impossible to create (42).

Larry Underwood is a backup musician who released a single that made the Top Forty. Larry then cuts an album in Los Angeles to capitalize on his initial success. Flush with the victory of a lucrative record deal, Larry rents a beach house in Malibu and throws a lavish party involving lots of people and lots of drugs. The following morning, a friend takes him for a walk on the beach and points out how much he owes a local drug dealer and that his upfront royalties won’t cover the expense. His friend advises him to pull the plug on the party and just drive away.

When Larry arrives back home in New York, he immediately goes to visit his mother. She doesn’t appreciate his type of music but invites him to stay at her apartment, knowing he has nowhere else to go. Larry acknowledges that his behavior is less than admirable:

He would go along, not thinking, getting people—including himself—into jams, and when the jams got bad enough, he would call upon that hard streak to extricate himself. As for the others? He would leave them to sink or swim on their own (64).

Frannie goes to visit her father, Peter Goldsmith, and breaks the news that she’s pregnant. Her father is supportive and promises to run interference with her mother. Peter discourages her from having an abortion, but Frannie has already decided to keep the baby and not marry Jesse.

Vic Palfrey is in a hospital bed in the Plague Center in Atlanta. From the other side of a glass observation window, doctors are watching him. A doctor in a hazmat suit enters his room and gives him an injection. Vic hears the doctor telling the others that if this shot doesn’t work, Vic will be dead by midnight. Stu Redman is also in quarantine in Atlanta. Stu realizes:

Campion and his wife and child had something pretty bad. It hit you like the flu or a summer cold, only it kept on getting worse, presumably until you choked to death on your own snot or until the fever burned you down. It was highly contagious (82).

Stu isn’t exhibiting any symptoms like the others. After undergoing various blood tests, he has had enough poking and prodding and insists on talking to someone who will give him some answers. Forty hours later, that person arrives.

On June 18, Joe Bob Brentwood stopped a speeder named Harry Trent and passed the disease to him. Harry, a traveling salesman, ate a meal at a roadside diner and infected 40 more people. Those people dispersed to various locations around the country, including New York and Oklahoma, where they transmitted the disease to others. Some of the people they encountered were heading west to California and spread the disease as they went.

In Shoyo, Arkansas, thieves attack a deaf-mute named Nick Andros and leave him for dead. Found in the middle of a highway, Nick ends up at the local jail, where Sheriff John Baker questions him. They communicate through written notes, and Nick identifies the five thieves as local men who are all personally known to Baker. The sheriff and Nick agree to try to convict them just as Baker feels himself developing symptoms of a cold.

Larry Underwood spends the night at the apartment of a girl he has just met. In the morning, he’s rude and insists he needs to get in touch with his mother because she doesn’t know where he has been for two days. Larry’s one-night stand reacts angrily and hits him in the forehead with a spatula. The cut begins to bleed. Larry takes a cab to Manhattan, where his mother works as the custodian of an office building. He thinks, “A memory circuit in the Department of Masochism clicked open and he heard Wayne Stukey saying, There’s something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil” (108).

Larry locates his mother in a custodial closet on the 24th floor. He apologizes for his absence and pleads for her not to be angry with him. She observes, “Trouble is something you have always looked around for when you couldn’t just turn your head and see it” (114). She says he’s always been a taker even though he means well. Relenting, his mother gives him 10 dollars to attend a movie until her shift ends. In the theater, someone is coughing in the row behind Larry.

Frannie is waiting in the parlor to break the news of her pregnancy to her mother, Carla. She thinks, “If the workshop was the goodness of childhood, symbolized by the phantom smell of her father’s pipe […] then the parlor was everything in childhood you wished you could forget” (120-21). Frannie has always been her father’s favorite, just as her dead brother, Fred, had been the apple of her mother’s eye.

When Frannie finally works up the courage to break the news, Carla is furious. She belittles and demeans her daughter until Frannie’s father intervenes. Peter wants Frannie to live in the family home after the baby arrives while Carla wants to throw her out. When Peter slaps Carla in an attempt to protect Frannie, Carla storms off, leaving the other two to console one another.