The Stand

The second Boulder spy, Dayna Jurgens, has been able to successfully embed herself into the Las Vegas colony and is now sleeping with Lloyd, Flagg’s second-in-command. She is upset when Lloyd tells her about the judge’s death because she suspects that the dark man already knew the old man’s identity and that Flagg may also have guessed who she is too. Equally upsetting is the news that Flagg is using Trashcan Man to create an arsenal of weapons.

One day, the simple-minded Tom Cullen arrives by bus, shocking Dayna. She realizes that the Boulder colony must have sent him as a third spy. Shortly after Tom’s arrival, Flagg’s group uncovers Dayna’s identity and they take her to Flagg’s office. Flagg dismisses his henchmen and says he wants to have a quiet chat with Dayna.

She was caught entirely in the web of his attraction, his glamour, and she was sure that when the turn was completed […] she would be staring into the face of her dreams […] A negative man with no face. She would see and then go mad (1095).

Much to her surprise, Flagg presents himself as affable and charming. He protests that he has no intention of harming the Free Zone. He even offers to let Dayna go if she will tell him one little thing. He wants to know the identity of the third spy. His hypnotic power is so strong that Dayna fears she might give him the information he needs. It occurs to her that Flagg can’t guess Tom’s identity because the boy, himself, is unaware of his own mission. Before Flagg can torture the information out of Dayna, she shatters his office window and severs her jugular vein on the broken glass to keep Tom’s secret. The next day, Lloyd burns her body out in the desert.

Angie Hirschfield has been a part of the Las Vegas colony for some time. Today, she’s minding a little boy named Dinny, who is quite fond of Lloyd. Sitting beside Angie is a younger woman named Julie Lawry who drifted in recently. The two watch as Tom wanders down the street, followed by Dinny, who pleads for Tom to pick him up and spin him around. Tom complies, much to Dinny’s delight. Angie explains to Julie that Tom is simple-minded but is also a favorite of Dinny’s. Julie’s eyes narrow when she recognizes Tom. He and Nick left her behind in Kansas after she tried to shoot them. 

Harold and Nadine are riding west on their motorcycles when Harold hits an oil slick on the road. His bike spins and sends him slamming into a guardrail, crushing his right leg. Harold goes over the side of the mountain and slides about 200 feet before a dead tree breaks his fall. When he calls for Nadine to throw down a rope, she refuses. She tells him that this was the dark man’s plan all along. “He feels that someone who would betray one side would probably betray the other. He’d kill you, but he’d drive you mad first. He has that power […] You can end it quickly if you’re brave. You know what I mean” (1117-18).

Harold crawls up the embankment and draws a Colt pistol. He tries to shoot Nadine twice but misses and slides backward on loose gravel. Nadine watches him for a while. Then she apologizes and continues on alone, leaving Harold to spend five days in agony until his food and water run out. He has one bullet left in his pistol. Before he uses it on himself, he thinks ironically, “He had seen himself as the king of anarchy, but the dark man had seen through him and had reduced him effortlessly to a shivering bag of bones dying badly by the highway” (1120). Harold has been writing in a makeshift journal in the days leading up to his death. In his final entry, he apologizes for all the harm that he has done but confesses that he did it of his own free will. After making this statement, he finally works up the courage to put the pistol in his mouth and pull the trigger.

Flagg spends the evening alone in Emigrant Valley, roasting a rabbit over a campfire. He ponders his current situation with some concern:

He had developed a sort of third eye. It was like the levitating ability; something he had and accepted but which he didn’t really understand. He was able to send it out, to see … almost always. But sometimes the eye fell mysteriously blind (1123-24).

He is troubled because he doesn’t know if Abagail said anything to her followers before she died. He’s also worried that Harold very nearly killed Nadine while she stood stock-still. He foresaw neither of those events, so he failed to prevent them. He is also unable to ferret out the name of the third spy and is beginning to doubt the inner voice that guides his actions.

Flagg has gone to the desert to wait for Nadine to arrive. Earlier that afternoon, her motorcycle died, and he knows that she’s walking the rest of the way to Las Vegas on foot. Flagg intercepts her and leads her back to his campsite. He considers this to be their wedding night and has sex with her repeatedly until he’s sure that she’s conceived his son. For her part, Nadine is horrified by the entire experience and remains stupefied afterward. The two ride back to Las Vegas the following morning in Flagg’s car. The dark man can’t shake the feeling that something is coming for him, and this thought unnerves him.

While Flagg is gone for his desert tryst with Nadine, Lloyd is handling matters in Las Vegas. One of the airplane pilots has come to him with a complaint about Trashcan Man. He claims that Trash deliberately placed an incendiary fuse in a fuel truck used by another pilot who had made fun of Trash that afternoon. The fuse exploded when the truck started. An inspection showed that all the other trucks have the same rigging. When Lloyd objects that it might have been someone else, the pilot says, “That’s not how it happened. Someone hurt his feelings while he was showing off his toys, and he tried to burn us all up. He damn near succeeded. Something’s got to be done, Lloyd” (1140).

Lloyd promises to speak to Flagg about the incident involving his favorite but doesn’t relish bringing bad news to the dark man. He’s concerned that things seem to be falling apart. Flagg wasn’t able to anticipate the second spy killing herself, and he still hasn’t found the third spy. Lloyd is beginning to doubt that Flagg knows everything. As he sits at a casino bar musing about these problems, Julie accosts him, claiming that Tom Cullen is up to no good. She believes that Nick must be with him and is probably the spy that Flagg is searching for. Even though he doesn’t credit Julie’s story, Lloyd takes down the names and promises to investigate the matter.

During that same night, Tom prepares to leave Las Vegas. It’s the night of the full moon, and his post-hypnotic suggestion tells him it’s time to head back to Boulder. He’s glad to leave because he doesn’t like the people in Vegas. Tom thinks, “They did things without asking for explanations of why they were doing them, or what it was for. It was as if these people were wearing happy-folks faces, but their real faces, their underneath-faces, were monster faces” (1145).

Tom follows his instructions to travel by night and sleep during the day. As he bicycles east of the city, he feels a strange sense of panic overtake him and believes that the dark man is looking for him. His all-seeing Eye is awake. Tom pedals faster and eventually escapes the sense that someone is watching him. He senses that the Eye glanced his way but overlooked him completely. Relieved, Tom travels until sunrise and then finds a concealed place to sleep the day away.

Flagg returns to Las Vegas with Nadine in tow. When Lloyd sees her passing through the hotel lobby, he’s shocked. “White hair, horrible sunburn, utterly empty eyes. They looked out at the world with a lack of expression that was beyond placidity, even beyond idiocy” (1149).

The dark man hasn’t summoned Lloyd yet for a status report, so the latter decides to follow up on Julie Lawry’s lead about Tom Cullen. Now that they’ve restored rudimentary phone service, Lloyd checks with his various sources. Tom is associated with a man named Nick Andros, who is on a secret red list. The red list contains the names of people who represent a special threat to the dark man, but Flagg never shared this list with Lloyd. If he had, Lloyd might have been able to intercept Tom before he left town. Lloyd next learns about a disaster at the airbase. Trashcan Man did more than sabotage fuel trucks the day earlier. This morning, he also rigged all the helicopters to explode with the pilots in them. There is now no one left trained to fly aircraft.

After receiving all this upsetting news, Flagg summons Lloyd. Nadine is sitting in the corner, catatonic. When Lloyd reports on the explosions at the airbase, Flagg calmly orders Lloyd to execute Trash quickly and painlessly, since he doesn’t want his protégé to suffer. When Lloyd names Tom as the third spy, Flagg says they can track him traveling along the interstate using aircraft. Lloyd points out that they have no functioning aircraft or pilots to fly them. The dark man grows furious at this latest upset and dismisses Lloyd. Flagg is growing increasingly unnerved by his own inability to foresee events. Everything seems to be falling apart:  

He had thought Trashcan Man could be thrown away like a defective tool. But he had succeeded in doing what the entire Free Zone could not have done. He had thrown dirt into the foolproof machinery of the dark man’s conquest (1163).

Nadine rouses herself from her trance and antagonizes Flagg by pointing out all the ways he is failing. “Everything you made here is falling apart, and why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short. People are […] saying you let Tom Cullen get away, just a simple retarded boy but smart enough to outwit Randall Flagg” (1165).

Nadine predicts that four men from the Free Zone are coming to confront him and that Flagg’s supporters will abandon him when the four arrive. Nadine keeps baiting the dark man until he becomes so enraged that he hurls her through a window, and she falls to her death. He belatedly realizes that she wanted him to kill her and their unborn child, unraveling yet another part of his plan.

Meanwhile, Tom is following his instructions to travel by night and hide during the day. Nick is coming to speak to him in dreams. He tells Tom to get off the highway and points him east using geographic landmarks. Tom manages to reach the Nevada-Utah border by the time he stops to rest for the day.

Trash is wandering in the desert, reproaching himself for the destruction he caused at the airbase. Someone had made a rude remark that reminded him of his humiliating childhood. Even as he placed all the incendiary devices, he had paused long enough to realize that he had a choice:

Trash had turned around and looked doubtfully at his handiwork. What was he doing, sabotaging the dark man’s equipment? It was senseless, insane. He would undo it, and quickly. Oh, but the lovely explosions. The lovely fires (1171).

Trash forges ahead with his plan and delights in the destruction that follows. Then, overcome with remorse for betraying Flagg, he drives off into the desert, intending to douse himself with gasoline and light a match. Belatedly, a thought occurs to him. Perhaps redemption and atonement are still possible. He drives further until he reaches Nellis Air Force Range, hoping to find something that the dark man can use as a weapon of mass destruction. A sign on a back wall attracts him. “Below that was a yellow-and-black emblem that showed three triangles pointed downward. The symbol for radiation. Trashcan Man laughed like a child and clapped his hands in the stillness” (1176).

Lloyd is in his hotel room, getting quietly drunk after hearing the news that Nadine threw herself off a balcony the day before. Because this couldn’t possibly have been part of Flagg’s plan, Lloyd has lost faith that the dark man is fully in control. He thinks,

I don’t understand it at all. Everything was going so good, right up to the night he came and said the old lady was dead over there in the Free Zone. He said the last obstacle was out of our way. But that’s when things started to get funny (1179).

Another member of Flagg’s inner circle, named Whitney, interrupts Lloyd’s musings. Whitney tells Lloyd that he and several other of the early converts are abandoning Flagg’s cause. They intend to flee to South America, and Whitney wants Lloyd to join them. Even though Lloyd promises not to betray Whitney, he says he’s going to stay loyal to Flagg. Lloyd explains that he’s got an important role to play in the dark man’s organization, and he doesn’t want to lose it.

That same night, September 17, Tom has reached Gunlock, Utah, where he spies a search party looking for him in the desert. He easily eludes them and finds a safe place to sleep. Once again, Nick guides his journey in dreams.

Trashcan continues to inspect the air force testing ground until he finds what he’s looking for—a nuclear warhead. He needs to find a way to haul the device up a flight of stairs and transport it back to Las Vegas. It occurs to him that he might expose himself to enough radiation in the process that he could die. This seems a fitting act of repentance for betraying Flagg. Trash thinks, “He was going to get that bomb up […] Somehow he was going to get it back to Las Vegas. He had to make up for the terrible thing he had done at Indian Springs. If he had to die to atone, then he would die” (1184).

Flagg has gone to camp out alone in the desert. He sends his Eye forth into the atmosphere to spy on who might be coming his way. Much to his surprise, he discovers four men and a dog huddled around a campfire east of Grand Junction, Colorado. The dog can sense his presence and isn’t afraid. It growls and barks at the Eye. Flagg realizes that Nadine’s prediction was right.

On her deathbed, Abagail must have sent this group to confront him. The dark man realizes, “They were coming of their own choice. They were coming wrapped in righteousness like a clutch of missionaries approaching the cannibal’s village. Oh, it was so lovely!” (1188).  The dark man will order his men to apprehend the four and bring them back alive. He intends to make an example of the group by beheading all of them, including the dog, and placing their heads on spikes in the courtyard of the hotel. Then, he believes, his wayward followers will flock back to his cause.