The Stand (Original Edition) by Stephen King Page A

day Wayne Stukey asked Larry to go for a walk with him down the beach. It had only been nine in the morning but the stereo was on, both TVs, and it sounded like an orgy was going on in the basement playroom. Larry had been sitting in an overstuffed living room chair, wearing only underpants, and trying owlishly to get the sense from a Superboy comic book. He felt very alert, but none of the words seemed to connect to anything. There was no gestalt. A Wagner piece was thundering from the quad speakers, and Wayne had to shout three or four times to make himself understood. Then Larry nodded. He felt as if he could walk for miles.
    But when the sunlight struck Larry’s eyeballs like needles, he suddenly changed his mind. No walk. Uh-uh. His eyes had been turned into magnifying glasses, and soon the sun would shine through them long enough to set his brains on fire. His brains felt tinder-dry.
    Wayne, gripping his arm firmly, insisted. They went down to the beach, over the warming sand to the darker brown hardpack, and Larry decided it had been a pretty good idea after all. The deepening sound of the breakers coming home was soothing. A gull, working to gain altitude, hung straining in the blue sky like a sketched white letter M.
    Wayne tugged his arm firmly. “Come on.”
    Larry got all the miles he had felt he could walk. Except that he no longer felt that way. He had an ugly headache and his spine felt as if it had turned to glass. His eyeballs were pulsing and his kidneys ached dully. An amphetamine hangover is not as painful as the morning after the night you got through a whole fifth of Four Roses, but it is not as pleasant, as, say, balling Raquel Welch would be. If he had another couple of uppers, he could climb neatly up on top of this eight-ball that wanted to run him down. He reached in his pocket to get them and for the first time became aware that he was clad only in skivvies that had been fresh three days ago.
    “Wayne, I wanna go back.”
    “Let’s walk a little more.” He thought that Wayne was looking at him strangely, with a mixture of exasperation and pity.
    “No, man, I only got my skivvies on. I’ll get picked up for indecent exposure.”
    “On this part of the coast you could wrap a bandanna around your wingwang and let your balls hang free and still not get picked up for indecent exposure. Come on, man.”
    “I’m tired,” Larry said querulously. He began to feel pissed at Wayne. This was Wayne’s way of getting back at him, because Larry had a hit and he, Wayne, only had a keyboard credit on the new album. He was no different than Julie. Everybody hated him now. Everyone had the knife out. His eyes blurred with easy tears.
    “Come on, man,” Wayne repeated, and they struck off up the beach again.
    They had walked perhaps another mile when double cramps struck the big muscles in Larry’s thighs. He screamed and collapsed onto the sand. It felt as if twin stilettos had been planted in his flesh at the same instant.
    “Cramps!” he screamed. “Oh man, cramps!”
    Wayne squatted beside him and pulled his legs out straight. The agony hit again and then Wayne went to work, hitting the knotted muscles, kneading them. At last the oxygen-starved tissues began to loosen.
    Larry, who had been holding his breath, began to gasp. “Oh man,” he said. “Thanks. That was . . . that was bad.”
    “Sure,” Wayne said, without much sympathy. “I bet it was, Larry. How are you now?”
    “Okay. But let’s just sit, huh? Then we’ll go back.”
    “I want to talk to you. I had to get you out here and I wanted you straight enough so you could understand what I was laying on you.” “What’s that, Wayne?” He thought: Here it comes. The pitch. But what Wayne said seemed so far from a pitch that for a moment he was back with the Superboy comic, trying to make sense of a six-word sentence.
    “The party’s got to end, Larry.”
    “Huh?”
    “The party. When you go back. You pull all the plugs, give