Page 184 of The End of the World As We Know It

“Well, sure I do, stupid,” she replied playfully.

“And you didn’t dream of them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Would I remember dreaming about them?”

“Yes, you fucking would,” Zeke said, no humor in his tone. “Of course you would. This is crazy. I haven’t met a single person who never dreamed of them. I thought I was the weirdo because I didn’t pick a side to follow, but you’re a new level.”

He explained to her then for the very first time how the members of their current group all decided, based on dreams, to go to Las Vegas and follow the man with no face, with crow feathers in his hair. He said that there were others who went to Colorado because they wanted to follow the woman in the corn. Zeke hadn’t followed either—he’d stayed in Los Angeles with a small group of people, but they had been recruited by the man with no face to do technical work. When the work was done, they were ordered to go to Las Vegas, but Zeke defected.

“I wanted to go to Scottsdale, Arizona,” he said. “I had it in my head to get me a boyfriend and live in one of those fancy houses out there. But it’s hot as hell in Arizona, and without power and air-conditioning, it wasn’t livable. I then ran into Mal and his group. They were all on the run, out of Vegas, and we decided to head east, form our own little town.”

“Do you still dream of the man and woman?”

“The dreams stopped before we all met. I think they stopped for all of us. When the dreams stopped, any sense of picking sides sort of went away.”

“So what? What did the dreams mean?” It sounded to her like scared people were dreaming up heroes.

Zeke sighed loudly and shrugged. “Hell if I know, kid. It felt like a lot more than it ended up turning out to be. I mean, they were real, or at least everyone says they were. I never saw the woman, and I only ever saw the man from far away, but from what everyone here tells me… everyone but Mal, anyway… they say I’m better off not having gotten too close to him.”

“Why?”

“He was scary,” Zeke answered. He said it quickly and then seemed to regret putting that thought into the air. “It doesn’t matter anymore. That part is over. Now we figure out how to survive.That’sreal. Dreams aren’t.”

Amy didn’t think too much on that conversation after that. She kept up with her daily chores, going to the houses and looking for various items. She would turn her findings in to Zeke, who would turn them over to Mal, who distributed the items from his residence in the Baptist church constituting the center of town. It was a simple white building with an austere, wide, single steeple. The very picture of a country church. He lived there with several others—people who, like Mal, seemed to regret leaving Las Vegas when they did. They stayed together, talking always of the man who went by the name Flagg—the man they dreamed of and then found in the desert. Everybody else shared the smattering of houses that surrounded that understood center. Amy shared a house with Zeke and an elderly man named Carter, who spent most of his time in a tufted recliner by the front window.

She sat with Carter one day listening to him sing, something he sometimes did. It made her long for the time before old tube neck, when she would go to church with her grandma and sing old hymns like Carter did.

“They’re talkin’ about you, ya know,” he said to her after his hymn ended.

“They are? ’Bout what?”

“You didn’t dream when the plague was killin’ everybody,” he answered. He reached out and put his hand on her arm. “Mal’s talkin’ bad about you.”

She felt her stomach bottom out. She’d always preferred that Mal not notice her at all, but him talking about her in a bad way made Amy feel a fear that she hadn’t been face-to-face with since the last troublemaker at Alderson Broaddus had disappeared.

“Bad how?”

Carter removed his hand and turned back to the window. “I don’t listen much to him. That man’s whole head turned sour. But he’s got people who listen to him, who look on him like they did that faceless man in the desert. Just be careful, especially when you’re out. Try not to be alone, you hear me?”

She nodded and licked her lips, finding her mouth dry and foul-tasting.

“Zeke’s been speakin’ on yer behalf,” Carter continued. “You gotta real good friend in him. You remember that.”

Later, when Zeke got home, looking haggard and wanting quiet, she pushed herself to knock lightly on his bedroom door.

“What is it?” his voice came from the other side. “I’m not good company right now.”

“Carter told me that Mal is talking about me,” she said. “What’s going on?”

He opened the door and waved her in. “What have you heard?”

“Carter said Mal heard about me not dreaming of the old woman or the man in the desert. Why is he all worked up about it?”

“Eh, Mal doesn’t make any sense, but the problem with him is that he’s convinced a lot of other people that he makesperfectsense. It’s a shame that the whole fucking world died of the flu and we ended up in a community full of people so prone to suggestion and hysteria.” Zeke’s tone was harsh, furious, and she was taken aback. He must have seen that on her face because his eyes softened.

“I told someone in passing, like gossip, that you didn’t dream. That was all. And it got to Mal and now he’s saying some crazy stuff. I want you to know that I am very sorry for running my mouth like that and I never thought it would turn into something.”

“I didn’t think it was a big deal, either,” she said. “What’s it turning into? What’s the something?”