Page 105 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Her floral housedress, worn fabric with its patched seams, draped to her thin ankles with a quiet elegance.

Arthritis like shards of glass driven into her hips and knees.

The pain of life. Her stomach didn’t grumble, no appetite to betray when she last ate or might eat again.

Her hands ran so cold, a chill that drilled down to her core.

Her dark skin mottled with blotchy and purple splotches.

Her mouth dry. Abagail stumbled over a half-buried root.

The landscape churned and she grew light-headed.

A black wind blew and she was so thin, a reed ready to be uprooted by it.

“Near the cross! I’ll watch and wait, hoping, hoping, hoping.

” A frieze of wrinkles enclosed her mouth, her lips fixed and determined.

The echoed lyrics turned the hymn into a plea, an infectious chord with jazz inflections, reminding her of another place, a younger self.

“And trusting ever. Till I reach the golden strand. Just beyond the river.”

As Abagail ended her song, the crowd burst into applause. The shouts drove the presence away.

Hattie met her at the stage steps, ushering her past the well-wishers and backslappers. “Now that’s what I’m talking about, Abby.”

“I like performing, is all. Give folks a taste of heaven.”

Hattie hugged her tight, drawing Abagail’s ear to her mouth. “You need to be out raising hell.”

“Hattie! I would never…” Abagail pulled away and swatted her arm.

“You should. You still in your prime, got a lot of life left in you.”

“I’ll leave the… raising to you.”

A shout erupted from the front door. A wave rippled through the crowd, a series of discontented murmurs souring the mood. The Broad-Brimmed Hat Man gestured for Hattie.

“Ain’t no point in headin’ Gatlin way. Nothing but a hornet’s nest.” Sweat stains darkened each underarm. “White couple claimed one of us attacked them with a pistol. The Gatlin Bee couldn’t wait to start writing about a ‘Black Beast on the prowl.’?”

Abagail knew the pattern of the gathering storm clouds from every Saturday night at the Grange.

The morning might start off calm, but by the afternoon, full of liquid courage, they’d work each other up into a lather.

Her father never went by after dark. The right spark might ignite into something horrible.

“Police done arrested a fifteen-year-old. Boy had been in bed all week with the flu, but that didn’t stop them.

Said he was acting suspicious by running when he approached.

The couple even said he was the assailant.

” The Broad-Brimmed Hat Man made his way to the bar.

Tapping the counter for a stout pour of moonshine to drown his resignation, he slumped heavily into a chair.

“Sheriff done sent half the police home, while some fool trots across the courthouse lawn on a white horse with a rope dangling from the saddle, stirring folks up.”

Even in Hemingford Home, like every other Black person in the United States, Abagail understood the rules for survival among white folks: to smile like they were family when encountered.

To “yes, sir” or “no, ma’am” them in every response.

To move off the sidewalk to allow them to pass unperturbed.

To know what streets to stay clear of, especially after dark.

And to always be mindful of their ways, because even a wink could get a boy killed.

She thought about the young man who died from the flu before he had the chance to live.

“No.” Abagail grabbed her purse and Bible. “No more.”

“Where are you going?” Hattie grabbed her elbow.

“Sometimes you have to get off your knees and do something,” Abagail said.

“Your faith’s not enough to keep you safe.”

“Iffen you’re fighting to be free every time you walk out the door, you ain’t promised to return,” Abagail said.

“Then I’m coming with you. Someone’s gotta watch your fool behind.”

The road wound its way from one end of the country to the other.

A series of farms nestled. Snorts of pigs.

The caws of a morning rooster who’d done lost all sense of time.

They made it to the outskirts of Speese, where they spied the white mob marching toward town.

The people of Gatlin only cared about reminding the folks in Speese of their place.

What would happen if they got too ambitious, if they stepped out of line.

Entering the woods, Abagail and Hattie approached a graveyard trimmed by an orchard of shrubs.

They passed mossy obelisks, grave markers, which could have been for Confederate soldiers if they weren’t so far north.

Abagail nervously hummed “In the Garden” as she crept to the center of the grove.

She stopped near the clearing of a Witness Tree. A low wind wound through its branches.

The leader trotted up on his white horse. The moonlight shown through the trees, though the shadows of the leaves dappled his face. His eyes blistered with fury.

“Hang him. If you can’t get him, hang someone else!” That voice. It belonged to the Moon Shadow Man. “We’ll get him if we have to burn the whole shack down!”

The mob undulated like an angry wave. Onlookers bore American flags.

Two small girls made their way through the crowd carrying pails filled with stones, passing them out like communion wafers.

The Gatlin sheriff dragged the young accused boy out from his vehicle before abandoning him like raw meat left to bait a bear trap.

The mob descended on the boy from all sides, caught up in a certain madness.

A contagion of hate, spreading from person to person faster than any superflu.

They tied a rope around the boy’s neck. The way he thrashed, desperate to live.

The will of the mob dragging him around to the front of the Witness Tree.

“I never did it. My God, I am innocent!” the boy screamed, his cries falling on deaf ears.

“Let’s show him some genuine southern hospitality.” The Moon Shadow Man gestured to the mob, a sinister conductor of terror. “Lift!”

“Lift! Lift for Gatlin! Lift for America!”

The roar of frenzied cheers and howls rose like they were at a party.

The boy called out for Jesus, crying into a dead phone.

They strung him up from a lamppost. His feet danced in the air.

The images flashed by faster than Abagail could take them in, not wanting to linger on any of it for too long.

Her heart couldn’t take the pain of it all. The eternal pain. The perpetual pain.

“Welladay,” Abagail lamented, abandoned in the face of absolute evil.

Not satisfied, some men in the crowd fired into his now still body, riddling him with bullets.

Brutality took on a life of its own, an empty maw of suffering, unable to be sated.

They were possessed by the impulse that made Cain split the skull of his brother.

A group virus, a spirit outside of themselves, the way worker bees served their unseen queen.

Drunk on the heady fumes of violence, they cut the boy down, tied him to a car.

They dragged him through the streets. It might as well have been a flickering scene from a moving picture show, history captured in lightning, as his corpse was driven several blocks, reduced to a shapeless mass of broken bones and swollen flesh.

Battered and bloody, no longer recognizable as human.

Unsatisfied, they soaked him in gasoline and piled trash on him.

They set what remained of him on fire. Tongues of flame lapped along the bark into the branches.

When the fire died out, people kicked the torso down the street.

The boy’s empty skull rattled to a halt, facing the dark sky.

The pain was unending, their need to destroy insatiable. And the Lord seemed determined to wait on the sidelines.

“No more,” Abagail said.

“Abby?”

“Sometimes you have to take a stand,” Abagail said. “We aren’t free until we are all free. Go on now, you hear? Organize our people. I’ll buy you the time you need to get ready.”

Hattie retreated. Black folks took refuge in their houses.

The mob then formed a parade of violence, beating any Black man they came across on their march to the jail.

Mugging for the assembled cameras. Laughing, shouting with glee, traipsing back to the jail to search for more Black prisoners to have sport with.

They broke into the gun store, blocked the courthouse entrance.

Even when police reinforcements arrived, the mob overwhelmed them and took their weapons.

Laws, civility, God all weak and helpless before the mob.

Lynch laws reigned supreme. They torched a parked car.

The crowd charged the large oak doors of the courthouse, setting fire to walls and furniture.

When the firefighters arrived, the mob cut their hoses.

Dozens of white men clustered under the wan glow of a streetlamp.

With no one to stand between them and the city.

Abagail stood in the road. Alone. Scared.

The only person against the tidal wave of their hate, rotting in the belly of the beast. They approached her, a ring of wolves closing in. All bared teeth and low growls.

“Dirty spade, I hear tell there were coons with guns. They need to be taught respect for the law.” The leader hopped down from his white horse, his mouth opened, a terrible maw filled with a dark laughter, but not with his own voice. “Your blood is in my fists.”

A preternatural terror gripped Abagail. She avoided his eyes, scared she might see the fleeting doubt of her own reflected in them.

She thought of what Hattie might do. And of David as Goliath tromped toward him.

Reaching down, she found a smooth stone.

She hurled it, hitting him in the head. Howling, he dropped to his knees.

“Get her!” He clutched his face, blood gushed between his fingers.