Page 118 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

HUNTED TO EXTINCTION

Premee Mohamed

Hunting wasn’t really a hobby anymore; the verb had lost meaning in a world where you could just about throw a rock from your front door and hit a deer.

Still, Val thought of herself as a Hunter sometimes, capital H , the archetype.

It had to be a challenge to earn the H : mornings like this, so still and bright that a human being was the strangest thing in the landscape.

The early October snow had tapered off after half an inch, showcasing dozens of tracks.

But she felt drawn to one specific set—a buck, she was certain, leading north to the densest woods, where the wolves did not like to go.

A canny one, Val decided, wincing at the loud crunch of leaves below the thin white blanket; she sketched him in her mind’s eye, pretending to be Sherlock Holmes. Well, Watson, as you can tell by the receipt for his hatmaker… As you can tell by the pattern of wear on his leather pocketbook … There.

A big fella for four points, listening to her approach, but facing the wrong way.

Val watched him, drawing butcher lines in her head.

Loin, tenderloin, chuck roast, chops, odds and ends for soup and sausage…

Slowly she unhooked her bow, unwrapped its muffling deerskin, notched a broadhead of her own manufacture.

Without wind, her frozen breath bloomed and lingered, blurring her sight. She held it as she set up for the shot.

The buck glanced back at her, seemingly uninterested. Val frowned, uneasy. Something about him…

A faint wail rose from behind her, and she spun reflexively, keeping two fingers on the arrow. She barely registered the buck fleeing through the brush. A cat? No—the dying cry of a rabbit, or something imitating one, not well. Yet the leafless aspens, the crowding spruce, were bare of birds.

She edged forward, flinching as the cry repeated.

A pitiful sound, close to the end of its strength.

But coherent thought left her in the full-body panic of feeling the ground give under her feet; she threw herself backward, falling on her ass, and just managed to evade the small but deep crack that had nearly swallowed her.

(And where the hell had that come from? She wasn’t out here often, it was true, but…)

Val clung to a sapling and leaned experimentally over the edge, staring into a strange darkness untouched by the sun.

As if it rose from the crevasse, a shockingly cold wind whipped into her face with the full force of a slap, startling her with the smell of impending snow.

Far below, something shifted sluggishly, the body language of a small, wounded thing—a fawn, she thought at first glimpse.

But at this time of year? No, something else.

Jesus. Jesus Christ.

A child, staring up at her, half-covered in snow and leaves. Splatters of blood black on the fawn-brown skin. Val reached out unthinkingly, stopped a moment before toppling in herself.

She babbled an incoherent stream of reassurances and promises, then tore herself away with an effort that seemed gargantuan. Already weeping, she stumbled away on legs that felt like stilts.

They returned at noon, a procession of matching bright blue quads with Val clutching the child to her chest in the middle vehicle, and the sky was darkening with impossible clouds: slate-gray, top-heavy cumulonimbus, planed flat as a table.

Worse, the temperature was in free fall, so that by the time they reached the infirmary, Val’s gloved hands were so numb she could barely manage the catches of her helmet.

Unspeaking, she gently fought off those trying to help, and carried the blanket-wrapped bundle in herself. As the door closed, there came across the woods a series of muffled cracks and low booms: the cries of trees freezing, of ice shouldering its way across the lake.

Val fed the stove first, then moved with the other council members to the periphery of the room so Bashir could work.

The tall, thin Somali served as doctor, nurse, paramedic, and veterinarian for their little lakeside community, treating anyone who couldn’t or didn’t feel like driving to town.

He was also Val’s closest friend, or at any rate, if they were not close friends, at least after twenty years they had never let each other down.

She trusted him, and she could not say that of many perfectly decent people in town.

His long fingers moved gingerly over the scrapes and bruises dotting the fawn-brown skin. “Hands, feet, forearms,” he murmured. “No frostbite, no defensive wounds…”

“No what?” Val said.

Bashir held up his hands, palm-out. “Like this,” he said softly. “When someone is attacking you, you instinctively protect your face. Then you see cuts here, broken fingers, the wounds of retreat.” He turned back to the child. “Where did you come from, little one?”

Next to Val, Lois Chan emitted a small, choked noise.

Val put a hand on the older woman’s birdlike shoulder.

She knew exactly what Lois was thinking, for she thought the same: that if she tried to speak again she might only produce noises, like the animal wail she’d heard in the ravine, or just sob and never stop.

Val had been twenty in the summer of what they now called the Fallout.

Too young, she had thought then, to know whether she wanted kids or not.

At twenty, you were supposed to have your whole life ahead of you, time to decide everything—marriage, kids, school, jobs.

The flu took all of that. Shut door after door in everyone’s face, stole every dream.

It had taken five years for a coherent narrative to trickle up from the States, assembled from the testimony of survivors and a team of investigators who had crisscrossed the country looking for any evidence not destroyed by the perpetrators.

A lab accident, then deliberate releases elsewhere (as if the flu could not move fast enough on its own); and something else, something unscientific: some terrible disaster both natural and supernatural, culminating in a single atomic explosion that had ended whatever it was for good.

Val knew about the dreams and the sides chosen; people had written books about it.

She had only experienced the barest edge—a whiff of a cornfield, the briefest glimpse of a red eye, searching—and although no one discussed it (there was no point now), she had a private theory that Americans had been affected more drastically.

Not that the dreams could read maps and stopped at the border, but that like the virus, the dark…

thing, whatever it was, had been engineered in America, nurtured and fed there, and so, too, had the other thing, whatever it was.

But everyone had been wrong to believe that long-ago, never-glimpsed mushroom cloud was the final disaster. Another one, slower, infinitely larger, unexpected and unprepared for, was waiting on the horizon.

As if reading her mind, Bashir said, “Based on dentition, I believe her age to be between five and seven years old.”

There it was. Val closed her eyes.

Babies born during the Fallout summer had a high mortality rate due to uneven medical care, but the survivors seemed to be fine well into toddlerhood.

Everything had seemed golden and hopeful.

Humanity had gone to its knees, almost extinguished, but now it was rising again, bleeding, swaying, but ready to continue the fight.

And then a virtually identical, but crucially different, superflu strain had arrived—as best they could tell in the postmortem—and wiped out the entire generation of those early babies.

Around a quarter of all the other survivors, those immune to the original superflu, had perished as well.

And in the final reckoning, it turned out anybody producing sperm had simply stopped producing it.

The birth rate dropped to zero and stayed there, and it had been there for eighteen years.

Bashir’s theory was an asymptomatic infection resulting in specific inflammation, like mumps.

Survivors had caught the second superflu and fought it off, but in so doing, their immune systems cooked and poisoned their spermatocytes to death.

The damage had been done. You just stopped hoping, you put the hope away.

You remembered the last time you saw a child (twenty-one years ago) and never thought about it again.

Bashir said, “She’s underweight and dehydrated, but not malnourished. Similar to the minor injuries on her hands and feet, I’d guess that’s recent. A couple of days, a week at most.”

“It’s a miracle,” Lois whispered. “She’s a miracle. We have to—”

“We do need to inform the rest of the council,” Bashir said. “Val?”

Val nodded, though it felt distant and cold, as if someone were holding her chin and making her do it.

Outside, the gunshot sounds of the lake continued.

She had heard of cold snaps, polar vortexes, something about air from the Arctic flowing in an unusual pattern, but she had never experienced one before.

The suddenness was terrifying, but the terror remained a low undercurrent under everything else she was feeling.

“Somewhere out there,” she said, “relatively nearby, it sounds like, may be the only fertile couple in the world. I’m probably exaggerating.

I hope I am. But we can all do math and I know we’re all thinking the math here looks like a miracle.

Mainly, we just can’t run off all half-cocked.

First of all, it was about zero this morning and now it’s minus forty—”

Martin Sykes glanced perfunctorily at the suction-cup thermometer stuck to the window, his lank blond hair straggling over his collar. “Minus forty-seven,” he said.