Page 119 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

“… So we’re not sending out a search party in this,” Val said.

“We’ll call a council meeting for tomorrow; I think everyone but us is in town,” she added.

Town meant Edmonton, once a city of close to a million people, now about one percent of that, but still the place where everyone bartered and worked and visited friends.

In a province speckled with lakes and abruptly empty lakeshore cabins, most folks still preferred to live in the city; only the crustiest hermits and misanthropes (Val thought fondly) chose to live in a cabin community like this one.

“I’ll start calling around,” Lois said, her voice trembling.

“Thanks, Lo.” Val glanced at Martin, then again at the thermometer next to him. Had it dropped again while she was watching? Jesus. “I’ll take her for tonight. Bash, come help me set up the cot in the office; I want her to be close to a bathroom.”

The others—Lois, Martin, Dean and Willa Monahan, Katy Coles, Ethan Weiskopf—filed out, already speculating about the weather, the search pattern, equipment.

Val was barely listening; she heard only the discordant song in her head: No.

We’re not giving her back no matter what the hell we find.

Mine, she’s mine. She’s mine, she’s my child, she belongs to me.

I found her and she’s mine.

She had never experienced cold like this, not in a lifetime of living here.

It registered not as temperature on the skin but force, as if the air itself had frozen solid and become a slab of metal pressing the breath out of their lungs.

Thank God she’d found the kid when she did; she’d have died of hypothermia in minutes.

That night, sleeping cat-light on the floor next to the little girl’s cot, Val dreamed her usual brain-clearing clutter: a lost gold watch that her grandmother had accused her of stealing; making pysanky at school, spattering hot beeswax on her hand; a stag that stood atop the snow and watched her with bright blue eyes.

Then it seemed she dreamed of a ringing phone, of screams incomprehensible in their terror and grief, and she dreamed she dressed and checked on the sleeping child and went outside and—

The cold kicked her awake from the night’s haze, burning the strip of exposed skin around her eyes like a blowtorch.

It was Willa Monahan, howling herself hoarse, and someone dragging her from the thing sprawled on the cabin’s front lawn.

Val stared, speechless, horrified less by what it was than the fact that she could not identify it at once.

It was Dean, splayed to the dawn sky and more than simply naked, opened up not like you’d butcher a deer but split as if by lightning, except that no lightning had ever carved so precisely.

The enormous ring of blood around him was going from black to gray under the falling snow; sheets of his skin ( Christ!

) were arranged in a matching circle, marked with letters, triangles, connecting lines, squirming ( Can’t be—just an effect of the snow ) lasciviously, demanding a closer look, a spider’s web of arcs and curves and in the center the spider itself, many-limbed with ribs and femurs ripped from its body and broken into sharp-edged legs.

Some sick fuck, some roving stranger. She knew everyone in this place.

Hell, maybe it was this very murderer that the child had fled, and the thought would have chilled her blood if she hadn’t been freezing already.

It wasn’t important. The murderer wasn’t here, and they had to get Dean, oh God, the body , to the infirmary, where Bash could—

“Val!”

Unthinking, she reached for the bow that wasn’t on her back, and something came at her from the side, knocking her into the snow so that for a second she was staring up into a star field of flakes, half-hypnotized—snapped out of it by something yanking on her boot.

She kicked it away and scrambled to her feet, slipping and cursing.

Bashir grabbed her under the arms, and they backed away, panting, the air knives in throat and lungs.

The others were scattering, screaming, from a chaos of forms in the snow.

Slinking from the woods bordering the lake, demurely veiled in the white lace of the snow, came creatures—predators, Val thought, but just like the people, she knew every creature here, the muskrats and weasels, the wolverines, wolves, the bears, coyotes, the few feral dogs that remained.

These were none of those and all of these, they were essence of carnivore: low, black-furred things, clawed and fanged, with backbones like snakes to squeeze into secret places. “Inside!” Val shouted.

She did not see who piled in, only shoved them to move faster, and was it her imagination or had something snatched at the very hem of her coat as she slammed the door? Surely the things had not reached the cabin in so short a time.

“We can’t leave him,” Willa sobbed. “We can’t leave him out there… We have to…”

“I know, I know,” Val said mechanically, patting the woman’s back.

“I know…” She wasn’t listening. Martin and Bashir were stoking the stove as high as it could safely go; Ethan was methodically—she could hear the squeak of his footsteps in the loft—closing and latching the shutters.

That was smart; she hadn’t thought of that.

Her heart was still pounding. The child was awake, though dazed, and staring up at the roomful of coat-bulked monsters as if they were about to bite her head off.

Val sent Lois to put on the kettle, then knelt next to the child, who was curled on her cot and wrapped in red-and-white-plaid blankets that she had pulled partly over her head, like a hood.

“Hey, you’re awake,” Val said, striving to sound light and cheery. “How do you feel?”

After a moment, the little girl extended a trembling, sticklike arm from her blanket nest, pointing at the front door.

“It’s all right,” Val said. “We’re safe in here. I guess it was pretty scary, all those folks yelling, huh?”

The child shook her head, dark hair clinging to the wool around her face. She pointed at the bandaged scrapes on her arm, then pointed at the door again.

“I… did the person… did those animals… hurt you?”

Nod, nod.

“Who was it? Can you tell us?”

Shake, shake.

Val felt woozy for a second—supposing this was the only child in the world, maybe a murderer didn’t know that and the animals couldn’t, but logic did not abate the wave of killing rage that washed over her.

When it ebbed, Val gripped the child’s blanketed shoulders.

“We’re safe,” she said again. “Nothing’s getting in. I won’t let anything hurt you.”

The child stared at her, the hope on her face heartbreaking. Val swallowed thickly. “I won’t,” she said. “You should eat. Come on.”

She held out her hand, and the child took it.

Val did not offer for anyone to stay the night; she simply dragged blankets and pillows out of the linen closet, and made Ethan pull out the sofa bed in the main room.

Every light in the cabin blazed, picking out the glass of framed photographs, glinting on the nails in the faux-timbered walls.

It had been decorated to look rustic, like a log cabin outside and in. Part of nature, Val thought bitterly.

But nothing natural had killed Dean Monahan.

The child had been put to bed in the loft once she’d proven she could manage the stairs.

After checking on her, Val folded herself into the overstuffed green corduroy chair next to the sofa, studying the others.

Willa’s face was the same color as her flaxen hair; at her request, Bash had given her a Valium, and Val had thought that the single pill would knock the teetotaler off her feet like a right hook, but she was still awake and did not look especially calm.

Lois, swaying. Martin, looking longingly at the liquor cabinet in the corner.

Big, dark Ethan huddled like a bear in his blankets next to the bow and full quiver of arrows Val had placed near the door.

If asked, she would not have been able to tell them why.

It wasn’t like she intended to open a window and pick the creatures off as if the cabin were a medieval castle under siege.

Val was not tall, not strong-looking; her mother had always jokingly said robust , built precisely like her Ukrainian peasant ancestors.

As a child she had fixated on a history book with a little throwaway fact about the English longbow, and how training took so long that you had to start when you were seven years old.

Now, after decades of indulging the childhood obsession, she startled people when she demonstrated the bow, revealing her powerful torso like a plastic action figure.

She estimated her draw weight slightly less than her own hundred and forty pounds; she could put an arrow through a medium-sized tree.

Folks smiled and nodded when she went out to hunt.

It was fine, it was just Prince Val, ha ha, out in the woods again with her rocket launcher.

She certainly believed she could kill the creatures.

She just hadn’t gotten the bow down with the intent.

Something specific about them made her uneasy, something that reminded her of the morning—she had told herself to remember it, but in the tangle and chaos of recovering the child from the ravine, she had forgotten.

“I dreamed of her last night,” Bashir said, his voice nearly inaudible below the hiss of the stove.

“The little girl… she was whole again, healed. She wore a dress of deer leather. And she was with my parents.” Val winced; his parents had died in an accident when he was in his teens, only a few years after immigrating to Canada.

In a way, he’d always said, that was a blessing: more merciful than the flu.

He added, “She did not speak. But my father said she wanted me to come with them, because they had a surprise—a present—for me. We would go together, he said. All of us, walking.”