Page 102 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Nasir watched his crinkled eyes, his wet lips, the spittle glistening on his mustache.

He glanced at the human train between the trucks—skeletal, hollow-eyed men, women, and children with cuts and bruises on their forearms and not a hint of life in their eyes.

Your vow , he thought. A pox on your fucking vow .

“And should you refuse,” Colonel Bajwa beamed at them, “why, I will kill all your men and take your women and children as slaves. As labor to clear out the roads and highways to render our beloved Pakistan habitable and traversable again.”

Placid as a mountain in springtime, Ujala met the colonel’s gaze and said, “Fuck you.”

His smile didn’t waver, even as a dull red began to seep into the corner of his eyes.

Ujala raised her left hand in the air, and on both sides of the highway several heads rose from the ledges of rooftops, their faces covered. Kalashnikovs and pistols slid into view and trained on the New Pakistan Army men.

Ujala’s voice didn’t shake. “We won’t give up our guns and you will leave us alone. We may or may not live to see tomorrow, but I promise you if you don’t leave, God help me, you and your men won’t, either.”

The red left his eyes. Colonel Bajwa gave a good-natured laugh and, raising both hands, began backing away. “I like this. Oh, I do like this.”

Behind him his men had taken cover behind vehicle doors and in the beds of their trucks. They watched their boss retreat with inscrutable eyes.

The colonel was smiling and shaking his head when he reached his truck.

“So, this is the deal, right? We’re going to camp in yonder field across the highway.

Tonight, exactly at eighteen-hundred, you will bring water and food for my prisoners, so they’re strong tomorrow to keep working on the highway.

“Now, say you decide you don’t want to do that.

Well, I decide to start killing the older, more useless of the prisoners one by one.

Every ten minutes you will hear a gunshot until I’m finished with the lot of them.

Then, if by oh-seven-hundred tomorrow I don’t have my ammo neatly stacked up around these barricades, we will return and kill every last one of you.

No prisoners and no exceptions. Is that clear enough for you, meri jaan? ”

Ujala had sparks in her eyes.

“Tonight,” the colonel repeated, and began to get into his truck.

A voice rang out, “Son! Son, listen to me!”

They all turned.

Maulvi Khizar had come out from the mosque’s main entrance and was seesawing toward the barricades, his walking stick precariously jabbing the ground.

“Maulvi sahib…” Ujala said.

“Khizar bhai!” Nasir cried, and lowered his weapon to make a grab for the mullah, but the old man thwarted him with a wild swing of the stick.

“Prisoners, eh?” the mullah was muttering.

His opaque eyes were fixed on the mass of trucks, his face red with determination.

“God’s children bound up like cattle. That’s how you will protect this country?

My father and grandfather’s land? You should be ashamed of yourself.

” His stick thwacked against a steel drum as he reached the barricades, making him stumble and nearly fall.

Colonel Bajwa stood behind his truck door, watching the old man. His mustache quivered. “You must be the imam of this mosque. God is great, indeed. Peace be upon you, Maulvi sahib.”

“And you, son, but I fear you don’t want peace.

You want subjugation.” Maulvi Khizar’s white beard heaved on his chest. His turban had fallen off and his scalp gleamed between tufts of thin hair.

“My father’s brother served in the army.

He was martyred in ’65 and now my very own army wants to take us all prisoners? How have things come to this?”

“Hush, imam sahib, your passion will be the death of you.” The colonel held up a hand before his soldiers, who had swung their guns around to face this new threat. “The army is here for your protection, I promise.”

Tears ran down Khizar’s cheeks. He blinked them away. “Man is born free—the One Pure and Merciful God has decreed that. No man has the right to enslave another. And you threaten us in the shade of Allah’s house—the last living mosque in this land, for all we know. Fear the wrath of God, damn you.”

The colonel’s raised hand clenched into a fist. His smile broadened into a toothy grin. “Careful now.”

In response, Khizar banged his walking stick on one of the drums as hard as he could, then pointed it at the line of prisoners. “Let those poor souls go before you’re condemned to hell forever.”

“Maulvi sahib,” Nasir yelled. “Please come back.”

The colonel’s fist flew open. With the heel of his hand, he made a thrust-forward motion in the air.

A shot rang out, the sound a rude, deafening shock that silenced every living thing in its vicinity.

Maulvi Khizar jerked like a puppet pulled by its master.

Slowly he turned around to face his friends.

A clean black hole, like a third blind eye, had appeared in the middle of his forehead.

A whiff of smoke came out of it and dissipated.

Khizar’s walking stick dropped from his hands and clattered on the road.

He smiled, or grimaced, and his right eye began to fill with blood.

“Khizar bhai!” Nasir screamed, and made to run to the dead mullah swaying on the highway, but Rashid grabbed his arm.

“No, Nasir!” Rashid hissed. “He’s gone.”

Faintly, as if from a great distance, Nasir heard Ujala cry, “Kill those bastards!” and the world was filled with blasts and whines and the staccato of gunfire. Nasir watched his own hands lift and begin firing, even as Rashid yanked him by his collar behind the cover of a drum.

Palwasha opened the mosque hall door to Nasir’s banging to find him propped against the wall, covered in blood.

“They’re coming,” he wheezed, trying to speak lucidly. A bullet had gone straight through his cheek, shattering his left jaw. “Ujala, Rashid, Faheem, all dead. It’s over.”

The girl’s grasp on her revolver tightened. Behind her, in the shadows, the eleven remaining women and children began to sob.

Nasir reached out with a tremulous hand to touch Palwasha’s green dupatta. She had washed it thoroughly after repair and it matched her eyes now. “Was this your mother’s?”

She nodded. “Ao, lala.”

“Palwashay-Gul.” He gripped her hand, his chest rising and falling.

“My little rose sister. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.

But you listen to your lala one last time: When the colonel’s men come in, they will want to take me out first. And Murtaza.

He’s our last shooter left alive. Hiding in the minaret.

When they’re busy with us, you slip out the back.

Leave everyone behind. I will try to make sure the bastard doesn’t catch us alive. But you—”

Palwasha cut him off. “No, Lala.” She gazed at him with such gravity Nasir’s heart wanted to break. “I will not abandon my family.”

Nasir couldn’t stop shaking. He tried to smile at her, but the left side of his face kept wanting to fall in on itself. “Then we will both stay here until this is done.”

Palwasha lowered herself down next to him.

Together they looked out into the courtyard prematurely darkened by rain clouds, at the pillars crowding together like spectators at a blood match, and Nasir thought of the three-day mela that used to come to Balakot and Muzaffarabad every year, the rickety Ferris wheel, horse rides, food stalls, balloons, and BB guns set up in the maidan by the soft green water of the Kunhar River.

My God , he thought. I will never smell the scents of a fair again, never hear children squeal with laughter again .

Overwhelmed with tears, he looked at Palwasha.

Her jade eyes gleamed in the dimness like a cat’s and he could hardly hear her when she said very softly, “They’re here, Lala.”

Sounds right outside the courtyard.

Shadows slipped into the mosque.

With great effort, Nasir lifted his gun and pointed it at the approaching men led by the colonel, who was limping slightly. His khakis had turned maroon at the left thigh, where a bullet must have grazed him. He didn’t seem particularly in pain.

The colonel slowed when he saw Nasir’s gun and grinned.

“I promised you all death if you didn’t listen,” he called out. Two of his men broke off and made for the steps leading up to the eastern minaret. “So, here I am and here it is. I wish I could offer mercy, but the word of an officer is his honor.”

Palwasha was tense against Nasir’s body, yet she didn’t raise her revolver. Nasir gripped his own handgun with both hands, hoping to steady it, but his vision was dimming. Too much blood loss. Too much—

From their right came a deep growl.

Nasir glanced into the mounting dark, trying to pierce it. There at the doorway of Khizar’s room, for the briefest of moments, Nasir glimpsed a large figure, wrapped in black, tall enough that its head was touching the doorframe.

Nasir shook his head—and it was only Hero after all, snarling, as he emerged from the room, canines shining, his hackles up.

“Who goes there!” the colonel’s sharp voice rang out. “Oh, a fucking dog, for God’s sake. Shoot him, won’t you, Jameel?”

The soldier raised his rifle and carefully aimed it at Hero.

Nasir’s body was drenched in sweat. His head swam. Something fell from his hands and he looked down in surprise. It was his gun, lying thousands of miles away between his feet.

This is it , he thought. This is what it feels like to die .

Someone took ahold of his face and kissed him on the forehead.

“Nasir Lala, look.” Palwashay-Gul turned his head gently until they were both looking at the gloaming between the mosque’s pillars. “Our friends are here.”

“Who?” he wheezed, not understanding.

She lowered her lips to his ears and whispered, “Burqan.”

And Nasir saw.

Dozens of dark figures emerging from behind the pillars, silent, majestic, tall as pines, jostling and churning together, like tree branches in a lashing high storm, coming apart, coalescing, then rushing at the armed men.

“Burqan,” Palwasha said again, her eyes wide with wonder.

The last thing Nasir saw, before a great darkness descended on him, was Hero, the spotted mongrel of the mullah, foaming at a mouth too large for a dog or even a wolf, making sounds no canine had ever made, slipping between the legs of the armed men, who screamed and screamed as their limbs were shorn off and their heads rolled like smooth river stones fresh from the bottom of the Kunhar, and Nasir thought absurdly, But you’re not allowed inside the mosque. Bad dog. What will Khizar say?

Then the grainy-white darkness was upon him and he thought no more.

Nasir woke up in a rickshaw on a bumpy road. It wasn’t Parrot—the doors were brown and made of plastic, not canvas—and a wave of terror overwhelmed the intense throbbing pain in his face and arms. When he tried to move, the agony twisted and returned with a roar, and he groaned.

“Easy, lala.”

Palwasha sat next to him in the rear of the rickshaw, holding his head in her lap, stroking his hair.

She looked so much older than her fifteen years, her face gaunt and tired, and was that a lock of white hair on her forehead?

He wanted to sit up, but dizziness hit him and he sank back down.

He opened his mouth, tried to ask, Where are we , but each word, each breath was a struggle, and the sound came out dusty and garbled.

Palwasha leaned in. “Khanewal.” She had understood. “We’re about an hour away.”

Who, who is driving?

She told him the whole story. From his position up in the minaret, Murtaza, their last man standing—a description by necessity; he was seventeen—had taken out the colonel’s remaining three goons posted out by the barracks.

After their near brush with certain death, the older women had rallied.

Farzana, a tiny, scoliotic sixty-year-old, had taken charge of the children, while Parveen rushed to a nearby dispensary to find first-aid kits and medicines.

They had clamped the remains of Nasir’s jaw together and sutured his wounds with thread and needle as best as they could.

When they finally took inventory, they had lost more than half of their little community of twenty-seven.

Palwasha hadn’t realized how few of them were there in the first place, and now that the mosque-community was decimated, it was unanimously decided that after burying their dead, they would leave the area using back roads.

What had the colonel said? A hundred more men a few hours away?

He might have lied, but they couldn’t take any chances.

But where would they go now that they’d lost the only place they could call home?

Uch, Palwasha told them. The city near the conjunction of five rivers.

“And do you know why I said Uch Sharif?” Palwasha asked Nasir as she changed his dressing and fed him crushed potato through a straw—he wouldn’t be able to chew for weeks.

“Why?”

“Because Khizar-chacha told me. After the evil men were dead,” she said, her voice full of love and sadness. “He said we’d build strength and a new home in Uch. We’ll be safe there until GT Road kills all the evil men walking on it one by one and is ready for us again.”

After , Nasir thought. She said Khizar spoke to her after the evil men were dead.

He didn’t ask her to explain. Just grunted. “Where’s Hero?”

“Sitting up front with Wajeeha, who volunteered to drive us.” And now Palwasha was smiling. “We freed all the prisoners, lala. Just like Khizar-chacha wanted. They’re all coming with us to Uch.”

Nasir wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He didn’t know any of them. But that fear was for tomorrow.

He repositioned his head on the girl’s lap and gazed directly into Hero’s warm brown eyes. The dog had poked his nose through the rickshaw’s partition. Nasir reached out and stroked the dog’s ears with two fingers. Hero barked happily and Nasir thought, A mouth too big for a dog or a wolf.

Hero turned into a wind, a blur, a swish of smokeless fire surrounding the men in the mosque.

Khizar never told them where he found Hero and they had never asked.

Nasir closed his eyes again and let his body feel the road, every turn and jolt of it vibrating up into the roots of his teeth. The road, the road, a tiny manifesto of humanity’s slipshod attempts at connecting, coagulating, warding off the inevitable end of it all.

He felt Hero lick his hand with his damp, rough tongue, remembered how he used to not like dogs. What a fool he was. What fools they all were, humans: scared, angry, brave, hopeful.

Good dog , he thought. Good dog, Hero.

Now stay .