The Stand recap

A weaponised superflu called Captain Trips escapes a government lab and kills more than ninety-nine percent of humanity within weeks. The scattered immune survivors - steady Stu Redman, pregnant Frannie Goldsmith, the reforming musician Larry Underwood, the deaf-mute Nick Andros and many others - are drawn by shared dreams toward two poles: the ancient, saintly Mother Abagail in the east, and the demonic dark man Randall Flagg in the west. The good gather in Boulder, Colorado, rebuilding a community, while Flagg raises a brutal order in Las Vegas. After the embittered Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross bomb the Free Zone's leaders and flee west, a dying Mother Abagail commands four men to walk unarmed to Las Vegas and confront Flagg. Stu breaks his leg and is left behind; the other three are captured. As Flagg moves to execute them, the Trashcan Man arrives with a nuclear warhead and a manifestation of God detonates it, destroying Flagg and his city. Stu survives, Frannie's baby lives through the flu, and humanity is given a fragile second chance - though Flagg is shown stirring again, far away.

A man-made 'superflu,' a biological weapon nicknamed Captain Trips, escapes a secret government installation when a technician flees with his family. He crashes his car into a gas station in the small town of Arnette, Texas, exposing the locals - among them a steady factory worker, Stu Redman - before he dies. The military moves in fast, seizing Stu and the others and sealing the town away, but the disease is already loose. Almost universally lethal and spreading through ordinary contact, it begins to burn silently outward from Arnette while the authorities try, and fail, to contain both the plague and the news of it.

Captain Trips spreads across the country with terrifying speed, killing the overwhelming majority of those it touches within days. The government's containment collapses into a brutal, doomed cover-up as soldiers and officials die alongside everyone else. Against this backdrop the story follows a widening cast of the naturally immune: Frannie Goldsmith in Maine, newly pregnant and burying her father, alongside her strange, resentful neighbour Harold Lauder; the musician Larry Underwood in a dying New York; the deaf-mute drifter Nick Andros in the South; and, among the harder survivors, the jailed petty criminal Lloyd Henreid. Ordinary life ends, institutions fail, and the immune are left to watch nearly everyone around them die.

With the plague's work all but complete, the survivors find themselves nearly alone in a continent of the dead, facing looting, breakdown and the sheer horror of the emptied world - Larry endures a nightmarish flight through a tunnel clogged with corpses to escape New York. As people set out to find other living souls, two figures begin haunting their sleep. The good-hearted dream of an ancient, saintly woman, Mother Abagail, who beckons them toward her Nebraska farm; the fearful and the ruthless dream instead of a grinning dark man in the west. The pyromaniac Trashcan Man drifts toward the latter, and Stu Redman escapes the government facility as its staff die around him.

The survivors begin to sort themselves. Drawn by their dreams, the decent gravitate east toward Mother Abagail, while the dark man - Randall Flagg, the 'Walkin' Dude' - gathers the violent and the desperate to himself in the west, rescuing men like Lloyd Henreid to serve him. Stu joins with the wry sociologist Glen Bateman; Nick Andros takes up with the guileless Tom Cullen; Larry works his way westward toward other survivors. The first book closes with humanity's remnant polarising between two poles: a fragile community of faith forming around a frail old woman, and a hard new order rising around a figure who is plainly something more, and worse, than a man.

The eastbound survivors converge on Boulder, Colorado, where they establish the Free Zone, a growing settlement that looks to Mother Abagail as its spiritual heart and begins the slow work of restoring power, order and something like normal life. Stu, Frannie, Larry, Nick, Glen and others take on leadership, forming a committee to govern the community. Newcomers keep arriving, among them the conflicted Nadine Cross. In the west, Flagg builds a far harsher society in Las Vegas, restoring technology and discipline through fear, and the two communities become aware of each other as rivals whose coexistence cannot last.

The Free Zone consolidates into a real society, electing its committee and debating how to deal with the growing threat in the west. Wary of Flagg, the leaders secretly send several of their own across the mountains as spies, a mission that goes badly. Meanwhile Flagg's reach extends into Boulder itself: nursing his humiliations and seduced by the dark man through Nadine Cross, Harold Lauder turns from wounded outsider into active traitor, and the two of them plot against the community's leadership from within.

As the second book closes, the Free Zone's recovery continues, but the threads of disaster are drawing tight beneath it. Mother Abagail is still missing, having walked out of Boulder into the wilderness in a crisis of humility, afraid the community had begun to make an idol of her; searches fail, and the Zone carries on under a growing unease. The committee's secret scouts - Judge Farris, Dayna Jurgens and the guileless Tom Cullen - make their separate ways west to bring back word of Flagg's strength, a mission the leaders privately fear will cost lives. Inside Boulder, Harold Lauder's resentment has hardened into commitment: guided by Nadine Cross, who believes herself promised to the dark man, he has secretly built a dynamite device, and the two of them lay their plan against the Free Zone's leadership while the committee, absorbed in the work of rebuilding, suspects nothing.

Harold and Nadine strike. At a gathering of the Free Zone committee, the dynamite bomb Harold built and hid explodes, killing several people - Nick Andros among them - and wounding others; the toll would have been far worse had word not spread moments earlier that Mother Abagail had been found, returned from the wilderness starved and near death, drawing much of the gathering outside just before the blast. The traitors flee west toward Flagg to claim their reward, leaving Boulder to grief, fear and the burial of its dead. Mother Abagail lingers for days, wasted and silent. With her last strength she wakes to deliver what she presents as God's command: four of the community's men - Stu Redman, Larry Underwood, Glen Bateman and Ralph Brentner - must go west on foot, without weapons or plan, to make a stand against the dark man in his own city. She names them, tells them the fate of the Zone rests on their obedience, and dies.

Obeying Mother Abagail's charge, Stu Redman, Larry Underwood, Glen Bateman and Ralph Brentner set out west toward Las Vegas as an act of faith, leaving Boulder and a pregnant Frannie behind. On the journey Stu falls and badly breaks his leg; unable to go on, he is left behind on the road, cared for by the wandering Tom Cullen, while the other three continue. Larry, Glen and Ralph walk on into Flagg's territory and are captured and imprisoned, awaiting the dark man's judgement - even as Flagg's own hold on his followers quietly begins to fray.

In Las Vegas, Flagg prepares to execute his captives publicly. As he does, the deranged Trashcan Man arrives dragging a working nuclear warhead, drawn back to his master. In the confrontation a manifestation of divine power - the 'hand of God' - appears and detonates the weapon, obliterating Flagg, his city and his followers, including Larry, Glen and Ralph, who die having made their stand. Stu, left behind with his broken leg and nursed through illness by Tom Cullen, survives and makes the long journey home. In Boulder, Frannie gives birth; her baby catches the superflu but recovers, the first proof that humanity can survive the disease. Stu and Frannie eventually leave the Free Zone as it begins to rebuild the same institutions that once destroyed the world. In a final coda, Flagg is shown to be not wholly gone, waking far away among a primitive people to begin his work again.

The Stand ends with Randall Flagg's western empire destroyed. Four men sent by the dying Mother Abagail walk unarmed toward Las Vegas; Stu Redman breaks his leg and is left on the road, tended by Tom Cullen, while Larry Underwood, Glen Bateman and Ralph Brentner are captured. As Flagg prepares to execute them before his followers, the Trashcan Man returns dragging a nuclear warhead, and a manifestation of divine power detonates it, wiping out Flagg, his city and his people - Larry, Glen and Ralph among them, dead but having made their stand. Stu survives his injury and illness with Tom's help and journeys back to Boulder. There Frannie Goldsmith has given birth; the baby contracts the superflu and recovers, the first hard evidence that the disease is survivable and that humanity has a future. As the Free Zone grows and begins rebuilding the machinery, bureaucracy and weapons of the world that destroyed itself, Stu and Frannie choose to leave it and start over somewhere quieter, uneasy about repeating old mistakes. In a closing coda, Flagg is revealed to have survived in some form, waking among a remote, primitive people under a new name, ready to gather power once more - the struggle between order and ruin left open rather than finished.