Page 116 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

South down 550, the highway gone underneath the mounds of drifting snow.

As they clopped through the valley, closing in on the mountain town of Ouray, Cin Haber dropped her horse back to walk alongside Leaf.

She had the look of a porcelain teapot about her—Leaf knew the woman had to be of soft feeling, but something about her seemed hard, too.

She unwound the scarf from her face, and Leaf saw her rounded, pillow-fat cheekbones were pink from the wind.

“I know your father a little,” she said. Her voice was chirpy, like a twittering bird. “Good man, good man. He speaks well of you.”

Leaf wasn’t sure how true that was, but he hoped it to be so. He offered an awkward, stiff smile. “Okay.”

“You ever shoot someone before, young man?”

He chewed a lip.

“I shot at a Ravager a year ago. Little more than a year, I guess. Late fall. I shot over his head on purpose—just a warning shot, and I didn’t have to shoot a second time—he got the message.

” Ravagers with their skull masks and their bone-rattle armor.

Strange folk. “He turned around, went back into the canyon lands.

“My only advice is, don’t flinch,” Cin said. He saw her face shift into something sad, then. The kind of face adults make when they’re trying to put on good spirits, but fail to make it believable.

“Only advice is, don’t miss ,” Brightfeather said from just ahead of them.

“That won’t be his problem, though,” Cin said with some clarity. And Leaf knew she wasn’t wrong. Leaf hit what he aimed at. As long as he could make himself pull the trigger.

The snow on the streets of Ouray mounded over dead men, dead women, dead children.

The snow covered them, mostly, but still in places the blood showed through, frozen now, frozen pink.

Some were still in the houses, or in the Elk Lodge barroom.

Each, slaughtered. Dozens of bodies, shot, cut, some with knives still in their chests or hatchets stuck in their skulls like they were nothing better than stumps.

All of it, horrifying, and Leaf wanted to throw up, but knew he had to keep it down, because if he showed weakness here, they’d leave him behind, tell him to head home.

He couldn’t abide that. He wanted to be here.

Wanted to do the right thing. A small voice inside him told him, This is you proving yourself, growing up a little bit, doing the real work.

Maybe if he hung tight and stayed true, he could go back to town, his head high.

Maybe May would keep him close. Give him work.

He could be like Brightfeather. Be in her orbit, keeping her safe—which meant keeping the people of Grand Junction safe.

But it was hard to keep that dream in mind now. His guts wanted out. He had to keep swallowing them down, down, down, pushing them into the cauldron of his stomach. Roiling, searing, like a belly full of bad vinegar.

They moved onto the lobby of a hotel toward the southern end of Ouray. Place called the Beaumont. No dead people here, but there was a message slashed into the old Victorian wallpaper behind the desk: a crooked smiley face, and above that, the words:

JOHN LOW LIVES

May said it was clear who did this. And that, horrible as it was, she was glad they were seeing it.

Because it told them in no uncertain terms who it was they were dealing with—and more importantly, why they had to go to Telluride.

“Dog or man goes rabid; your choices narrow only to two. You kill him before he bites, or you let yourself be bitten and take his disease unto you.”

At that, she told them to each find rooms in the hotel. They’d stay here for the night, then move on.

Leaf’s room was a messy, unkempt thing. Full of dust and spiders.

But it offered a bed, and though it had no blankets, he could easily unfurl his bedroll there and sleep on the mattress.

Springs tried to poke through, but it was better than the lumps of the earth, and certainly an improvement over trying to clear snow and rest on the cold ground.

Exhausted, he still had to chase sleep for a while, pursuing it through fields of blood, through meadows of the dead.

Over time, he managed. And over time, he dreamed.

He was again in a different life, a different world.

He’d seen many televisions before, but never once lit up like it was now, a wide box of light showing dazzling displays of cars—not dead and defunct, but rip-tearing down a smooth, unbothered strip of asphalt—and he sat in front of that box with some kind of control device in his hand, a thing with buttons and jiggle sticks on it.

Like he was making those cars go, somehow.

Music blasted, filling the room: a band he’d never heard before, not on a record or on some previously discovered cassette, but one his dream mind called Glimdrop.

A golden retriever bounded into the room behind a couple friends of his.

The dog— my dog , he realized—was Goldie.

His friends were Naseem and Jace. They were laughing, eating some kind of crunchy orange snack, their fingers dusted with the stuff.

It felt so normal. So nice. Less like a dream and more like Leaf was standing in the doorway to another world, watching.

But then he woke, and the door closed. That world went away.

The way to Telluride was a hard row to hoe, and over the next two days they left the road and hit the trails, heading west out of Ouray.

Through the valley and then up around a peak.

A snow squall hit them on the first day and slowed their journey.

Otto helped flush game, and Leaf shot it—rabbits, mostly.

Cin said during their first dinner, “You know rabbits don’t have enough fat on them? You try to live on rabbit, you’ll still starve. Helluva thing, that. You can eat and eat and eat and still die from starvation.”

May countered with: “It’s not starvation like you think of it. But your body will still break down when it doesn’t get what it needs. Balance is everything, inside and out. But for now, the rabbits will do.”

Brightfeather grunted, like he didn’t want to hear any of this. A man who preferred to be in silence, Leaf figured. A little like his father. Few words spoken.

On the last day, the skies cleared, which May lamented a little—said it would’ve been nice to get into Telluride under the cover of bad weather.

But it was what it was, and soon it was night.

The moon big, pregnant with light. And there, in that light, they looked down from the ridge to see the town of Telluride.

This is it , Leaf knew. Shit .

It was morning now, the sun spearing through a break in the clouds from the east—those spears of light pinning the target, the Hotel Telluride. Fixing it like a pig to the ground.

Leaf: now alone. The others had gone on, down into town under the cover of early-morning darkness.

“Before they wake,” May said. “And before the next shift of guards comes in. The ones who are there will be tired. They won’t expect us.

” When she told Leaf his part of the plan, he quaked like the clusters of aspens all around them.

He tried to keep still, tried to put some steel in his spine, but he couldn’t keep the fear from crawling all over him.

Brightfeather questioned his courage, called him a pussy, but May shushed the man.

Told Brightfeather, “Leaf is the one for this job. He’ll do it, and he’ll do it well. ”

“Look at him shake. He’s scared shitless,” Brightfeather said.

“We all should be. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s doing something necessary in spite of it .” This last part she said almost angrily. Like Brightfeather should’ve known better. Chastened, the man let it drop, and she gave a short nod to Leaf, who returned it.

Presently, he was on his belly, lying amid the leafless bones of underbrush, the barrel of the Winchester pointed toward the hotel.

A box of ammo—ammo his father had loaded, most likely—sat next to him.

His job per Mother May I was simple in execution: In there, that’s where John Low is.

He sleeps on the top floor of that hotel, and we are going to go in there and we are going to kill him.

Once that starts, there will be people coming out of the hotel, and others running toward it.

Shoot them all, Leaf. Same way you took down that elk: a whistling locomotive of lead punching through the soft hills of their lungs.

Then she gently tapped the scope atop the rifle.

The circle and the cross , she said, and winked.

He waited.

The line of the sun crept forward, like an advancing army.

Behind him, the trail they used to get here was trickling with snowmelt. Made him have to take a piss, that sound, but he held it. He had to hold it. For as long as he could. For as long as was needed. Still, his bladder burned with urgency.

He scanned the windows of the hotel, looking for movement.

The hotel was old-timey, from an era whose name he didn’t know.

No movement in the windows. He scoped the streets, too, looking for something, anything.

The streets were full of trash. Heaps of it, careless and unclean.

A wind juggled a wisp of black plastic garbage bag across the road.

A rat chased after it, like it was a game, then was gone. And then—

A gunshot. Muffled, somewhat. From inside the hotel.

Shit, shit, shit, shit .

His heart kicked up like a spooked rabbit, rushing through the brush of him. He tried to steady his breathing, and got his eye hovering over the scope.

Another shot. Bang .

His hands shook. His teeth rattled.

At the bottom floor of the hotel, the main door blasted open and two men came bolting out, running for a tall pole across the street, a pole with a brass bell nesting upon it—a long chain dangling.