Page 114 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

GRAND JUNCTION

Chuck Wendig

It’s five hundred yards if it’s an inch , Leaf decided.

The elk out there was no record setter, but was a big bull just the same—real thick in the front, almost like he’d tip over if he leaned forward too far.

His one antler was goofy, too, way it spun off at the tip, bent a weird way, like it was trying to escape from the other one.

The young man felt a bit of wet snot trickling out of his nose, already freezing to his lip—the day was cold and the ground he was lying upon only made it colder, what with last night’s snow.

Every part of him wanted to sniff and suck it back up, but even from here, that little sound might spook the bull.

He let out all the breath he’d been holding. You got this. You’re just part of the gun now. The elk lifted his head up, looked around like he didn’t have a care in the world. Then Leaf squeezed the trigger.

“Clean as a whistle, that shot, right through the lungs,” someone said behind him, and Leaf about pissed himself. He’d already popped the tripod and slung the rifle over his shoulder, and he spun, scrambling with the weapon—

Only to find himself looking at a legend.

“Mother May I,” he said. He eased the rifle back to his shoulder and lifted his hands up, palms out. Kept his head low a little. Have some respect , he told himself. You fucking idiot .

“Please,” she said. “Just May.”

Mother May I ran their small city, Grand Junction.

She’d been elected fifteen years ago, and hadn’t lost an election since.

He’d never been this close to her, and remarked at how—even what, in her sixties?

—she was still somehow both imposing in her appearance and also radiated an aura of calm.

May was weathered, worn like Leaf’s saddlebags, with close-cropped hair—it was silly to think of it this way, maybe, but her dark eyes and long pointed nose made him think of a snowman, with two coals staring out over a carrot sniffer.

She went on: “You know your way around a rifle. I did, too, once upon a time. In the bad old days.”

“I—sure, yeah. Yes. I—” He looked around. She didn’t seem to have anyone with her. She usually had men with her. Advisers. Guards. She had to. Leadership had its burdens and people wanting to put you in the ground was one of them, he figured. “Forgive me for asking, but am I dreaming this?”

A dry chuckle. “You dream of these things often?”

“No,” he lied, after some hesitation. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie, not really. He had dreams, strange dreams, but… not quite like this. Dreams of now, but of another place. May had dreams, too. Was famous for them. According to her, she sometimes made decisions based on what she saw when she slept.

“This isn’t a dream, Leaf.”

Holy hell, she knows my name .

She kept on:

“You’re planning on packing out that bull elk all by yourself?”

He shrugged. “Got my mule. I can use a barrel hitch to pack the quarters—”

“Gonna be two, three hundred pounds. And those antlers are worth keeping, too. Make tool handles with them. I’ve got my horse and I miss doing this sort of thing, to be honest. So I’m inclined to help, if you’re inclined to let me.”

“Of course. Th-thank you,” he stammered.

“We can have a conversation in the meantime. Come on. Let’s go deal with the bounty you’ll bring us, son.”

As they worked together under the sun and in the wind to bleed out the elk and butcher the beast, rendering it into its parts to be packed, Mother May I did not mince her words:

“I have dreams, too, Leaf. Lately I’ve found that they have intruded upon this world, the waking one.

I’ve seen things that I used to only see when I had my eyes closed, but now they’re here.

Now they’re real. I saw a snake with two heads in my house a month ago.

Two weeks later, I found a rat in my bed—had been pregnant, but when I found her, the babies were out and chewing their dead mother to pieces.

And two days ago, I saw two fat fish crows out back of my place, circling one another on the ground, barely choosing to take flight at all except to hop and flutter—and they pecked and pecked at each other, pecking out one another’s eyes, pecking apart the other one’s feet, stabbing and sticking each other until they were both just bloody feathered lumps still somehow moving about.

Circling, circling. Like water around a drain, but never going down it.

Like they were forced to do it. Trapped in this circle, spilling more blood than I would’ve thought two birds could contain.

And that’s when I knew, these are signs, Leaf.

Signs that evil has come back. That it has been born again, as it often is—no!

As it always is. It died in Las Vegas thirty years ago, but no garden can remain free of weeds forever.

No heart can escape hate. And no world will be shut of evil.

It is the way of things. But we stand vigil. Don’t we? We do, we do.”

All the while, she helped him reduce this once-great beast to its parts.

Haunches and shoulders, head off, antlers off, the blood out, the organs left to steam.

She worked hard, bearing down with the knife, helping Leaf do what needed to be done with nary a moment’s hesitation.

May helped him field dress the bull like it was the most important job in her life.

The same way, he believed, that she did everything.

The same way, too, that she asked him for his help at the end of it:

“I have scouts out. Sent to the four corners. Sniffing at the margins, seeing where the evil is. I fear it’s close, which means it will be our problem to deal with, not Boulder’s, not Moab, not Green River.

Can’t call upon Charlie or Chels in Montana, not Captain Campbell at Buckley.

The wheel turns and if the marble lands in black, it’s our problem, and if that is as true as I think it is, I’ll need you, Leaf.

I’ll need that keen eye of yours and, if you’ll forgive me, that trigger finger. Will you help me if it comes to it?”

What other answer was there but yes ?

She smiled, then: a rare sign. Her eyes were bright and intense—blue as the sky behind the drifting clouds above.

“Good. Good. I’ve spoken with your father, so he knows what I’ve asked.

But to the rest, I ask you keep this quiet.

No need to stir the flock to fear, son. Let them have their peace.

And let us hope that this is nothing at all but the troubled thinking of an old, timeworn woman. ”

Later, at evening’s fall, Leaf met his father at the old man’s reloading bench. Wisps of hair off his balding head like mist off a warming pond.

“Heard you brought in a big one,” the old man said in his draggy, monotone drawl.

“Sure did, Pop. Not one for the books, but big enough.”

His father didn’t look away from the bench, instead sliding another brass casing into its seat, and tucking it in real good like he was putting a baby to bed.

“One shot, too,” he said, a note of what Leaf thought might be pride in there—but pride swirled with something else. Like clear water, made turbid from a whorl of mud.

“Yup. Just the one.”

Powder trickled into the brass cartridge, then Pop pulled the lever arm down, pressing the bullet snug into the top. He took it out, breathed a few hot puffs of air on it and gave it a shine. A 7-millimeter round, fresh and gleaming. He handed it over with a smirk. “One for one.”

“Thanks, Pop.”

Awkwardness bled out between them like a gut-shot animal.

Leaf sighed and turned to leave, but his father cleared his throat and said, suddenly, “Hold up, now.”

“What is it?”

“I know what she asked of you. Mother May I. She spoke to me first. She always asks. She’s… good like that. But…”

The words seemed to catch in his throat. Leaf urged him on. “What?”

“You’re young yet, Leaf. I was… young, too, younger than you, when the shit hit, Captain Trips ripping through everyone like a brushfire and—”

“I know all this, Jesus Christ,” Leaf snapped, but then he felt bad about it.

His father didn’t deserve that. The old man was alone—Leaf’s mother had died a decade past, and from just a dumb cut on the top of her foot she didn’t see until it was too late, till it was already infected, and that infection moved fast. Dug into her blood like a screw that got stripped.

Nothing would pull it out of her. She died two weeks after. Leaving them both alone.

Pop, for the most part, seemed to take the boy’s sharp tone in stride.

“I’m just saying, I’ve seen some things.

And don’t get me wrong, Mother is a good leader, a righteous shepherd to this town, but I also know that leaders are leaders are leaders, and all leaders know that when push comes to shove, the people they lead aren’t people all the time.

They’re tools in the hand. Shovel and rasp, rope and bucket and—and that!

” Here, he finally turned all the way around and shook a finger at the rifle still hanging off Leaf’s shoulder.

“You think you wield the gun well, careful now, because she’ll wield you . ”

“Pop, I don’t even know if she needs me.”

His father gave a sad smile. “I saw her eyes, Leaf. She’s gonna need you. Got that gaze fixed on you like a wolf’s look. You just be careful. Tools break. And sometimes tools can’t be fixed again.”

Leaf felt something squirm in his gut. A tightening worry. “It’s fine, Pop,” he said, trying to keep that worry—and his teenage irritation—out of his voice. ( Not sure I really did a good job , he thought distressingly.)

“Go get dinner sorted,” Pop said.

“Sure thing.”