Page 109 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

“It was frightening,” he confessed. “The book was published about two weeks after Captain Trips escaped that Department of Defense facility in the desert. I started seeing it in bookstore windows just as the news began to report cases of the superflu. I watched at first as polite society began to grind to a halt, and then watched further as things collapsed all around me. The death rate in my novel—from my visions—was a staggering ninety-nine-point-four, which was the exact number both the CDC and the WHO claimed as the death rate for Captain Trips. I was living in New York at the time, and the city at first became a war zone, and then became a morgue. I wound up escaping through a hellish version of the Holland Tunnel, filled with dead bodies and the buzz of flies. That incessant, maddening buzz.”

“Did you think you had caused it all?”

His smile faltered. It was the first time anyone had ever asked him that question.

“Um. No, I didn’t think that at all. I did start to wonder where those visions had come from, though, and if I had overlooked something important in those mysterious transmissions that might have prevented all of this. ”

“Like warning the Defense Department ahead of time,” Zarah suggested.

“I’ve thought about that a lot,” he admitted. “The thing is, Zarah, I didn’t realize I was seeing glimpses of the future until the future was already here, and by then it was already too late.”

A silence settled between them in that moment, weighted in all its quietude.

Then Zarah leaned forward the slightest bit, so that the candlelight shifted about her face. “Will you come with me? I’d like to show you something.”

5

She lit a kerosene lantern and led Cree out into the back field.

It was fully dark now, the three-quarter moon partially hidden behind a strand of gossamer clouds.

He paused in mid-stride to glance up at the sky, and in a monotone voice, said, “M-O-O-N.” Then he smiled sadly at Zarah.

“One of the characters in my novel spells everything as—”

“Yes, I’ve read the book.”

“Seven times.”

She smiled, too. Said, “Yes. Seven times.”

“You know what I often think about? It’s true my book predicted all the major events over the past year that we’ve all now come to know as fact.

Yet how many smaller parts of my novel—the characters, the sub-sub-subplots, the love affairs and minor tragedies, the people —also came true?

I often wonder and get frustrated by the idea that I will never know the answer. ”

“I believe in it all,” she told him, and she watched as his eyes glittered in the glow from the lantern. “I believe you were less a novelist, Mr. Cree, and more of a conduit. A transcriptionist. That book of yours in my house? It’s no novel. It’s a history book.”

The night had grown cold and she could see that he was shivering, so she turned and continued through the field, beckoning him to follow. Once they reached the first row of crosses, she stopped and held the lantern out so that he could see them.

“There are fifty-seven graves in this field, Mr. Cree. Each one an infant. The youngest lasted only a day. The oldest one made it a full two weeks.” She turned to him, and could see the wan, pale expression on Cree’s righteous, intelligent face.

“Everyone here in Calvary survived the superflu because we’re immune. Yet our children are not.”

She ran a hand down the quiet swell of her belly.

Cree watched her, and understood.

“I hear rumors that you can no longer prophesize, Mr. Cree. That your gift has dried up. That you travel the country giving inspirational talks of hope, but that you can no longer see the future.”

Cree’s mouth must have gone dry, because when he spoke, she could hear the smacking sound of his lips. “Yes. That’s true.”

“I’m frightened for the baby inside me. Can you tell me anything that will bring me peace?”

Again: the dry, smacking sound of his lips.

“We just have to have faith,” he told her.

They stood there in silence a moment longer before Zarah turned and led him back to the house.

Before disappearing inside, she glanced toward the road and saw Benjamin standing there in the moonlight, like something summoned from a pit of fire and brimstone.

If Cree noticed the man, he said nothing about it.

6

Jacob woke early the next morning in an empty house to a discordant jangle of musical instruments being played outside in the street.

In nothing but his boxer shorts, he went to the bedroom window and saw that there was something of a ragtag crowd gathered outside the house.

It was not yet eight in the morning, according to his wristwatch, yet here they were, anxious and excited for the ceremony to start.

There was no fresh water in the tub this morning, so he skipped bathing, and climbed back into the same clothes he’d traveled here in the day before.

He always wore the same clothes—the ones he’d worn in his novel’s author photo.

As a younger man, he’d never been a superstitious person, but after the book was published and the world had gone to hell just as he’d inadvertently predicted, many beliefs Jacob Cree had previously held had irrevocably changed.

He thought now that if he continued to wear his author-photo getup, he might begin to receive those transmissions again.

It was silly, of course—he knew this deep down—but sometimes in the darkest hours, it was comforting to cling to seemingly silly things.

He had performed this show countless times before, traveling from one city to the next, a sterile, former prophet, making the circuit like some vaudevillian—hopeless, yet proselytizing hope.

It had started out feeling like an obligation, like penance.

Did you think you had caused it all? Zarah had asked him last night, admittedly unnerving him, and while he didn’t believe that, he had, early on, felt in some way responsible.

When survivors began seeking him out and asking him to visit their villages, he’d felt like Christ among the Nephites.

They gave him food and water and whatever else they felt to have retained any value in this new world.

He accepted only the food and water, and a warm bed, whenever they could spare one.

He was no dummy: he knew he was chasing some bastardized version of salvation.

Did you think you had caused it all?

Jacob Cree collected his suitcase and stepped out into the bright sunshine to greet his people.

7

Zarah Smith felt something swell inside her chest as Cree stepped from the house and smiled at the townsfolk.

The women applauded and the men hollered their approval into the air.

Carrying that black clamshell suitcase looking like a large chunk of coal with a handle, Cree came down the porch steps as the group of assorted musicians struck up what sounded bizarrely like “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

The women were dressed in white linen gowns and with flowers in their hair—Zarah was, too—and the men wore neckties over their chambray shirts, their hair greased and combed, their faces cleanly shaved.

Ted Lomm wore a tight-fitting suit jacket and a ridiculous neon bow tie as he came up to Cree and shook the man’s hand.

Then he led Cree down the walk toward the street, and the rest of the townsfolk—Zarah included—fell behind in step.

On the far side of the graveyard field, opposite Zarah and Benjamin’s house, the town council had erected a small stage.

Behind the stage, a large white sheet to match the women’s dresses loomed in the air, held aloft by scaffolding that some of the men had set up over the past week.

There was festive bunting around the stage and many folding chairs set up in the empty part of the field, facing the stage and that large white sheet.

Zarah moved quickly through the crowd so that she could claim one of the chairs in the front row.

She sat with an audible huff, her excitement radiating through her like an electrical current.

That excitement was halted, however, when she happened to glimpse Benjamin among the crowd.

No, not truly—more like standing off by himself beneath the shade of a copse of willow trees.

He was dressed in his dingy overalls, his hair a mess, a look of utter disdain on his face.

He had a backpack slung over one shoulder and was holding a long gun by the stock.

8

A woman placed a wreath of flowers around Jacob’s neck and two other women led him up onto the stage.

There was a podium and a microphone set up, which was better than the bullhorns he sometimes had to use for large crowds.

His speech usually lasted about forty minutes—he’d tell them how the visions started, how he’d written the book, and how he wished he had recognized those visions for what they were at the time.

He’d conclude with how humankind should remain vigilant and keep an open mind, because no one could ever tell when the next batch of visions might arrive, and to whom they might come.

He would take questions and do the best he could to answer them.

And in the end, he would be optimistic about leaving them inspired, or, at the very least, with some modicum of hope for the future.

Ted Lomm walked in lockstep across the stage with him. At one point, he produced a handkerchief from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and blotted his glistening forehead. “Gonna be a hot one,” he muttered, and Jacob nodded in agreement.

Mitchell Detroit and two other men stood beside the podium. One of the men adjusted the microphone. The men all wore neckties over flannel shirts.

As Jacob carried his suitcase to the podium and the crowd began to take their seats, he noticed Zarah Smith, who was in the front row, rise and run across the field toward a man standing in the shade of a group of willow trees.

9

“What are you doing, Benjamin?”

She stood before him, breathless, both hands swimming absently over the slight protrusion of her belly.

Benjamin’s eyes narrowed. His face was burned from the sun and he sported about three days’ growth along his square jaw. He looked past Zarah and up at the stage—at Jacob Cree, of course—and she could see the wheels turning behind his dim, booze-bleary eyes.

“Answer me, Benjamin.”

“This is wrong,” he said, and his voice was as flat and emotionless as a sheet of plywood. “You’ve all gone crazy and I won’t sit idly by and watch it happen. Especially with my baby in your belly, Zarah.”

He reached out and gripped her about the wrist.

10

Jacob stepped up to the microphone and addressed the Calvary audience with a pleasant greeting, while, from the corner of his eye, he kept an eye on Zarah and the large man she was talking to beneath the tree. A man with a gun.

11

“Come with me,” Benjamin said.

Zarah pulled her wrist free. “Is that it, then? That’s your plan? You’re a coward? You’re running away?”

“This ain’t the way. This town is lost, Zarah. Come with me. We should leave.”

“And go where? I have to save the baby,” she said, taking a step back from him. “We have to save all the babies.”

“This will save no one,” Benjamin said, and he suddenly looked miserable. “This will damn you all to hell.”

She took another step back. And another. Her voice firm, her palms pressed against her swollen belly, she said, “You’re a coward, Benjamin Lewis! Do you hear me? You’re a coward !”

Benjamin stared at her for a heartbeat. They were too far from the crowd to attract any attention, but Benjamin glanced around at everyone nonetheless.

Then he looked toward the stage again, just as the giant white sheet was lowered to reveal a large wooden cross, fifteen feet high. Cheers broke out among the townsfolk.

“Madness,” Benjamin said, just as he turned to leave her, and—

12

—Jacob turned to see the monstrous thing revealed from behind the sheet, a massive wooden cross whose shadow fell directly upon him, a thing of such impossibility that he couldn’t at first comprehend exactly what—

Ted Lomm gripped him on one arm.

Mitchell Detroit gripped him on the other.

Several more men came up behind Jacob, wrapping their arms around him, squeezing the air from his lungs, and lifting his feet off the floor of the stage.

Jacob’s suitcase fell off the stage, as—

13

—Zarah ran back to the join the crowd. Her heart was pumping, and that electric energy was surging through her system again.

She was smiling, laughing, and tears were beginning to stream down her face.

She was joined at the front of the stage by all the other women in white dresses—women who had, over and over again, filled that field with their dead offspring—and they joined hands, sweaty palm to sweaty palm. Squeezing.

On the stage, Jacob Cree screamed. The cross was lowered to the floor of the stage and he was dragged down onto it. He struggled, but it was futile. His clothes—

( That tweed jacket! Zarah’s mind prattled, recalling the author photo on Cree’s book.)

—were stripped from him, everything but the wreath of flowers, and then men approached carrying heavy mallets and iron spikes.

Sweaty and breathing hard, Ted Lomm approached the podium. Against the background of Cree’s screams as the spikes were pounded through his wrists, Ted said, into the microphone, “We’re a community that has looked out for each other since inception. We take great care—”

“ —to take great care! ” the townsfolk finished.

“Today, my friends, we send this harbinger of doom back to hell! And we will live in peace, prosperity, and good health for us and our children , from here on out!”

The women on either side of Zarah raised their hands, taking her hands with theirs. Those tears of joy kept spilling down her face, and she squeezed the hands of her sisters tightly… until she spied Cree’s strange black suitcase lying on the ground.

She broke away from her sisters, went over to it, opened it up, and found that it was—

Empty.

A final scream pierced the morning air. Zarah looked up in time to see the cross being raised again, this time with Jacob Cree nailed to it, naked and streaked with bright red streamers of blood, his head limp on his neck, that incongruous string of flowers hanging across his chest.

They watched Cree die, and when the prophet was done dying, one of the men who had killed him tossed his hammer in the dirt.

Zarah rushed to it, dropped to her knees, and bowed her head.