Page 120 of The End of the World As We Know It

She didn’t think at first that he’d answer. But then, he nodded. “Yup. I didn’t want to tell you. But I did. Lots of ’em.”

“And it wasn’t about the old woman, was it?”

It meant he had been dreaming of the Walkin Dude. Dreaming of violence and chaos. She pointed with the gun. “Get going, and don’t come back or I’ll put a slug in you. Don’t doubt it.”

That night, she locked up the farmhouse and spent the night in the barn with Ruby. She kept the lantern burning and the shotgun close at hand. In all the excitement, Maryellen realized that she’d forgotten to make her tea. After a minute’s thought, she decided not to bother with it. She was almost out of the ingredients and soon would have to get used to not having it anyway. Plus, she didn’t want to be knocked out in case Wayne tried to return. For the first night in a very long time, Maryellen would try to fall asleep on her own.

Once she managed to slip into a fitful sleep, Maryellen had her first dream of the old woman called Mother Abagail. She dreamt she was riding Ruby up to the cabin where the old woman lived. Mother Abagail came down from her front porch and right up to Maryellen. She reached up to stroke Ruby’s broad cheek and pat her velvet nose.

“You done the right thing getting rid of that man. You weren’t saved from this disease only to lose yourself tohim,” the old womantold her in the dream. “And now I want you to come west to see me. I’m calling all the people like you. We need to band together because we got a mission in front of us. You need to be part of that, Maryellen. Now, I’m not going to tell you that it’s going to be easy, you by yourself, on this horse of yours, riding clean across the country. But I know you can do it. You’ll meet some people along the way who are like that man you just run off. But you’ll also meet people like yourself. Good people, people you can trust. But first you got to leave your family’s house. You got to start this journey. I know you’re worried about this old girl here”—she patted the mare’s nose again—“but you don’t need to. She may be old, like me, but we’re both tougher than you know. She’ll get you to where you need to be.”

When Maryellen awoke, it felt like she’d had the conversation in real life, face-to-face. The truth of it warmed her chest. She went over to Ruby and rubbed between her eyes. The mare nosed her curiously. Even Ruby could tell something was different.

Maryellen spent the day packing, albeit with the shotgun at her side, taking a break to peer out the window whenever she heard a noise. She knew Ruby wouldn’t be able to carry much, but she didn’t see an alternative. She resolved not to worry and trust that the Lord would provide along the way. She took enough oats to last Ruby three or four days. A few pieces of clothing. Some food, a plastic jug of water. An improvised first-aid kit and a few tools. The shotgun and all the shells, including the box Josiah Phelps had given her.

Then she saddled Ruby and led her to her family’s graves. An ache lodged in her throat, knowing it was the last time she would ever see them, and it almost caused her to change her mind. But then she put her foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. Immediately, she felt better. The world seemed right when she was riding Ruby. She pressed her heels lightly to the mare’s side to urge the horse on, the old woman’s words singing in her ears.

I LOVE THE DEAD

Josh Malerman

“How could they have named it after him?How?How can you take the kindest, warmest, wisest man on the planet… and name something so terrible after him? I don’t understand! Someone tell me, please! Except there’s nobody to tell me. Nobody left! How do you like that? Just when a man needs an answer. This is ridiculous. This is insane!Captain Trips?Do they not know it’s his nickname? The punk kids who started calling it that… is it because they hate him? Oh, they all hate him, don’t they! They hate his kindness, his intelligence… they hate the way he plays the guitar! What a bunch of pigeon shit. All they see are the Jerry Bears and dancing skeletons and they think, ‘This is not for me. This is the end of the world.’ And their heads are so far up their butts that when the end of the world actually comes… they name it after him. Jerry Garcia! Captain Trips. How could they? Howdarethey?”

Lev had been thinking about Jerry Garcia when he found the finger in the meadow. But the odds of anything interesting happening while he was thinking of Jerry were high, as he thought of little else.

He’d seen body parts in recent days. Oh, boy. The dead lined thestreets of Boise like fish pumped up from the sewers. Most had died from the superflu, but violence has a tendency of dancing when bad music plays. And so, he’d seen arms, legs, heads, even an eye. But a finger? All alone and outside of town? And not just any finger: it was the top two-thirds, sliced off above the knuckle.

Just like Jerry Garcia’s finger had been when he was a boy.

“Holyshit,” Lev said. And the enormity he felt was more powerful than the fear he’d had of the superflu. The desire to show someone, anyone, was crushed by the understanding that nobody remained.

Picking the hard thing up from the grass, he eyed it through a pair of small spectacles. The same sort Jerry had been wearing these days. And he thought, not for the first time:

Is Jerry Garcia still alive?

“Captain Trips,” he said. And he laughed. Because in the face of all things horrible, here was undoubtedly a sign. The missing finger of the world’s greatest guitar player. And a chance, for Lev, at purpose.

He would leave Boise.

He would go to San Francisco.

He would bring Jerry Garcia his finger.

Lev’s legs hurt. His legs always hurt. Exercise of any kind hurt. He preferred couches and record players. Joints and thick beers. But all this walking, this exertion, was killing him. His back hurt. His arms were tired from flailing as he ranted. His joints felt like marble.

But his heart hurt the most.

The disrespect shown to the greatest musician the world had ever known was a thing he could not reconcile. Could not accept. And whenever Lev Marks felt this way, he played his guitar.

“There’s a fallen tree,” he said, to himself, always talking to himself these days. “A good place for a song. You wanna hear how good he is? I’ll show you how good he is. You don’t need technology to play the acoustic guitar, suckers!”

The guitar had been strapped to his back since Boise. He’d picked up both it and the shirt on the same downtown strip in that now dead city. Bodies everywhere back there. Lev preferred to think of them as dancing skeletons. He squinted when he saw dead bodies, wreckage, empty cars, and storefronts. Made it all look more like a painting, an album cover, album art. And what killer album art it was.

He swung the guitar’s soft case from over his shoulder and sat on the fallen tree. The sun was up, big, hot, and the many colors of his tie-dyed shirt were bright. His belly hung out the bottom; they’d only had a medium and Lev Marks was certainly a large.

The Martin acoustic placed gently on his leg, he reached into his cargo shorts and pulled forth the finger. He ran his chord hand through his thinning curly hair. Sweat had pooled on the lenses of those little glasses.

He strummed the guitar, using the dead finger as a pick.