Chapter 24 Chapter 23

Randall Flagg, the man in black, strode south on National Highway 51, enjoying the night on both sides of the road.This road runs from Idaho to Nevada.From Nevada he could go anywhere.From New Orleans to Nogales, from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, that's his hometown, and no one knows it better, loves it more.He knows where every road leads, and he won't lose his way even at night.Now, an hour before dawn, he was somewhere between Grasmere and Riddle, west of Twin Falls and north of the two-state Duck Valley Reservation.Isn't that accurate enough? He walked fast, tapping the heels of his boots on the road.As soon as the headlights appeared on the horizon, he hurried off the road and disappeared over the shoulder of the tall grass... When the car passed him, the driver also seemed to feel a chill, as if he was passing a section of the road. The wilderness, sleeping wife and children were also disturbed, as if everything they touched was related to a nightmare they had at the same time.

He walked south on State Route 51, the heels of his frayed cowboy boots thumping the pavement.He was wearing faded denim jeans and a black denim jacket. He was tall and ageless in appearance.The pockets were full of fifty books of different kinds against each other—books for the seasons and sophistry of all kinds.Covers everything, like the dangers of nuclear power plants; the role of the International Jewish Federation in subverting friendly governments; CIA anti-cocaine liaisons; the Farm Workers Union; Jehovah's Witnesses (if you can answer 10 of these If the question is yes, you will be saved); Negroes for militancy and spiritual equality; the Ku Klux Klan, etc.He has all these things.The breast pockets on either side of the jacket feature a graphic button - a cute smiling face on the right, a drawing of a dead pig on the left and the words "How does your pork taste?"

He kept walking, neither stopping nor slowing down.His eyes seemed to burst from the possibilities of the night.He was carrying a scuffed old Boy Scout backpack.You can imagine that there may be a secret joy rising on his face-or maybe you will guess it right.It was a face of frightening ugliness.The face that would shatter dishes in the hands of tired waitresses in parking lots, the face that would make children ride their trikes through wooden fences and wail at their mothers with shards of stakes that had pierced their knees. And it will bloody the barroom debate about batting averages. He was heading south on State Route 51 somewhere between Grasmere and Riddle, now closer to Nevada.Soon he will be camping, sleeping soundly all day and waking up at nightfall.As he cooks dinner over a small campfire, he'll figure out whether the words came from some seedy erotic novel, or from a comic strip by Mein Kemp or R. Crumb, or from The embattled opposition papers of a leading figure in the United States, still from the Patriot Song.When they were printed, Flagg became an equal opportunity reader.

After dinner, he will continue on the road, continuing south on this road through the wilderness.As we walked, we saw, smelled, and listened to the wilderness where only sagebrush and tumbleweed could grow because the climate became more and more arid, and the mountains in the distance rose from the ground like the backs of dinosaurs.By dawn tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, he would be in Nevada, first to Owyhee and then to Mountain City.In Mountain City he was going to meet a man named Christopher Bradenman, see if he could get him a nice car and a set of papers to identify him, and come back alive and as honorable as he could be. to hometown.The country with a network of roads extending in all directions like magical capillaries will accept him and remove every part of his body-heart, liver, lungs, spots of black foreign matter in his brain.He's a goofy fool, a bone spur looking for soft tissue to pierce.

He swaggered with his arms outstretched.He knew, and knew very well, that the poor and the mad, the professional revolutionaries, and those whom the Church hates with gnashing teeth, often dodged along this road.They don't expect to be welcomed into cheap rooms with slogans and advertisements on the walls, into basements propped up by sawed-off pipes from explosions, into crazy plans like assassinating cabinet members; Kidnapping the children of high-ranking officials who are visiting; or breaking into the Standard Oil board meeting with grenades and submachine guns, and murdering people on the list, etc.He knew everything about this place so well that even the craziest would only dare to glance furtively at his dark, grinning face.The women he'd slept with, sometimes even just to get something to eat from the refrigerator, often just accepted him with their stiff bodies and their faces turned away.When he enters the room, the hysterical babbling - backbiting, counter-claims, accusations, ideological sophistry - stops immediately, there is a moment of deathly silence, and then it turns to him, as if he Came among them with a broken and terrible motor.Some things are a million times worse than renegade chemistry students making plastic explosives in underground labs, or getting weapons from greedy ex-soldiers.As if he had come to them with a bloody gun that had been hidden in grease for centuries, and now he had a birthday cake that looked like a candle made of dynamite Bring it to the meeting.When he starts talking, the meeting becomes sane and disciplined -- as sane and disciplined as madmen are subdued -- and agrees on all sorts of things.

He swaggered on, his feet dangling back and forth in his boots.Feet and boots are his old buddies.Mountain City's Christopher Bradenman would have identified him as Richard Frye.Bradenman had been a conductor on the subway system where the outlaws operated.A half dozen or so different organizations, from the Weather Bureau personnel to Guevara's brigade, knew that Bradenman was rich.Because he sometimes gave lectures at Liberty University, sometimes as a poet to the western states, such as Utah, Nevada and Arizona, and gave lectures in English to an institution of higher learning.He had hoped to captivate the boys and girls in the intermediate classes with the living mental anesthesia of poetry.Bredenman is now in his late 60s. Twenty years ago, he was dismissed from a university in California because of his affiliation with the Students for a Democratic Society.Arrested at the Greater Chicago Police Conference in 1968 for his association with one radical group after another.

The big man in black smiled as he walked.Bredenman was just one contact, and there were thousands more—crazies who were scattered everywhere with pamphlets and bombs.They communicate with each other using joint codes, ready to take action at any time.In New York, his name was Robert Frank, and he claimed to be a Negro, which no one questioned, although he was very light-skinned.Together with a black veteran named Nam who harbored a deep hatred for the loss of his left leg, he killed six police officers in New York and New Jersey.In Georgia, he was Ramsay Forrest, Nathan Bedford, a distant descendant of De Forrest, and is recorded in his files as having participated in two robberies, a castration and An operation to burn down a nigger ghetto.But that was all a long time ago, during the first civil rights wave in the early 60s.He sometimes thinks he might have been killed in that conflict.He must have forgotten a lot of what happened to him before, except that he was actually from Nebraska and had once attended a high school with a bow-legged red-haired boy named Charles Starkweather.He still has vivid memories of the civil rights marches of 1960 and 1961 — the fights, the night raids, the cathedral explosions that seemed like some kind of monster inside had grown bigger and bigger than it could hold.He still remembers a trip to New Orleans in 1962 and a meeting with a young man who distributed pamphlets demanding that the United States allow Cuba to self-determinate.That young man must be Mr. Oswald.He had taken some of Oswald's pamphlets, and he still has two of them, but they are all torn and wrinkled.He has attended more than 100 related committee meetings.He has participated in demonstrations against more than 10 companies on 100 college campuses.He had written about the hardest questions for those in power when they went to class, but he never asked them himself;He also never gave a speech at a rally, because the microphones tended to respond to the hysteria by screaming, or blowing out circuits.But he has written speeches, several of which have ended amid riots, overturned cars, disrupted election polls and violent demonstrations.In the early 1960s, he had known a man named Donald de Fritz, and suggested that De Fritz adopt the name Sinque.He had helped plan the kidnapping of an heiress and was the one who suggested driving the heiress insane rather than holding her to ransom.He left the Los Angeles hut before the police went in and de Fritz and the others hadn't been drunk for 20 minutes; On the pavement, the expression on the face that makes mothers snatch up babies and push them into the house with horror, the expression that can make pregnant women feel premature labor pains.Later, when the remnants of the gang were captured, it was known that there was another person involved with the gang, and possibly an important one, a not-young man called "Walker" or Bug-Iman people.

He walked steadily, step by step.He was also in Lalami, Wyoming, two days earlier, where he, along with others, blew up a power plant.Today, he is on State Highway 51 between Grasmere and Riddle, on the road leading to Mountain City.Tomorrow, he'll be somewhere else.He's happier than ever, and that's because... He stopped. Because something is coming this way.He could feel it, he could almost smell it in the night air, a warm smell of soot from everywhere, as if God was preparing a picnic to grill all civilization.The coals were hot, whitish and flaky on the outside, red like a devil's eye on the inside.A big thing, a huge thing is coming.

His moment of transformation is at hand.He will be regenerated, he will be reborn from the birth canal of some monstrous thing painted the color of sand.This huge monster was in the throes of uterine contractions. When the blood gushed out, his legs were shaking slowly, and his fiery red eyes were staring at the ethereal space. He was born when times were ready to change again.It's going to happen, it's going to happen this soft night in Idaho. Now is the time for regeneration.He knows it.Why did he need one last trick of the wrist?He closed his eyes and raised his hot face slightly to the dark night sky just before dawn.He was engrossed, and he smiled.His dirty, disrepaired boot heel was starting to lift off the road, 1 inch, 2 inches, 3 inches... .He grinned grinningly.Now his feet are rising, his feet have left the ground, and he is hanging smoothly above the road.

Then he felt a little dawn light in the sky, and he lowered himself down again.That moment has not yet come. But that moment was fleeting. He started on his way, grinning, looking for a place to spend the day.Time passed so fast that he didn't even know what was going on.