Page 124 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

A few well-loved paperback books written by people whose names meant less than nothing to Fern.

Photos of smiling people and crying babies and days at the beach with coolers full of beer bottles like icy green dreams. Faded children’s shirts folded as reverently as altar cloths: Spider-Man, Strawberry Shortcake, Big Bird, Future Astronaut.

A heavy double-bagged tangle of jewelry.

Fern turned the snarl of gold over in her hands.

There were some big fat diamonds in there, rubies, too.

Maybe even real. The house wasn’t that nice, though.

Somebody probably scraped and scrimped and skipped a new winter coat to buy these.

They probably meant so much to somebody, somewhen.

Enough to try to crank back their throwing arm and try to lob this bomb of diamonds and rubies and feelings all the way into a far future where kids could grow up to be astronauts.

Fern tossed the gold behind her onto a stack of paint drop cloths, still stained with carefully chosen main-and-trim colors.

She wasn’t after any of that. She wanted what was underneath.

What she knew in her bones was underneath.

A stack of loose typed pages, full of typos and pain and hope, sealed like broccoli in a freezer bag in case anyone ever gave a fuck.

Fern Ramsey gave so many fucks. All of them, in fact.

All she had. All for whoever this was, whatever had happened to them, whatever they would never be now.

For the very specific kind of one-in-a-hundred-houses kind of person who would take the time to cram a message down the neck of their house like a wine bottle and chuck it into the sea of time.

They just didn’t make ’em like that anymore.

Fern could see a sentence sticking up over the opaque white stripe on the freezer bag where you were meant to write Spaghetti Sauce or Cookie Dough and the date.

My name was Kimberley Lynn McKiver.

Her heart started pinballing all over her chest. She licked her lips. Yes. There you are, pretty dead thing. Pretty dead Kim with your pretty dead heart.

Fern slid her finger down the plastic zip-seal and pulled out the pages. She lay them reverently in her lap, cool and smooth against her peach-fuzzed skin.

My name was Kimberley Lynn McKiver.

I lived in this house for twelve years before Captain Trips rang the doorbell, and thirty-three years after. I had four children, if you can believe it. I was a pharmacist. Sure did want to be a writer once upon a when, though. Guess this is my chance. Look out, Mr. Pullit, sir. Here I come.

I loved my husband. I loved my dogs. I loved my babies. I tried to bury them. I’m really sorry. I did try. I guess I should have gone to the gym more. The earth here is just so hard. Plus I screwed up and got old. Everyone seems to have gotten that one right but me.

They’re in the upstairs bedroom. Tucked in tight. Hopefully I am, too, and we’re all six of us together for always. Take anything you need from the house. It’s yours. It’s all yours now.

I existed. So did they. I mattered. So did they. It all mattered.

This is who we were. And this is how we left you.

Fern settled in to read in earnest. Six hours later, she hadn’t stood or stretched, eaten or drunk, or moved at all—except to fidget idly with her tangled mess of hair, twirling and untwirling a long curl around her finger as the sun army-crawled across a thoughtless, heartless sky.

By dusk, the girl had risen two inches above the concrete. Floating crisscross applesauce in the still air, hunched over her treasure, all her limbs awake.

She didn’t notice.

A crow noticed. It watched her motionlessly from the arms of an aspen tree.

Spring, 1996

A white-tailed deer and her fawn bend their heads to drink on the pebbly shore of Lake Keowee.

Phlegmy streaks of stars spatter the South Carolina sky above; reflect in the water below and in the round pupilless eyes of the deer.

The silent buttes of concrete cooling towers in the hills above the lake slash the night into dark and darker.

Sky and water and shadows and moonless quiet.

Cobwebs work the maintenance board at Oconee Nuclear Station.

Dust supervises the shift-change. The peeling vinyl seats at the workstations dip into round, deep, comfortable hollows, as though some ghost’s hardworking rump is still waiting out the clock on retirement under burnt-out fluorescents and lifeless EXIT signs.

The control rod indicators blink on and off steadily over a swollen brown suit jacket containing the skeleton of Crew Chief Tom Fortunado.

Last one out. Mouth full of blood and lungs full of crawling rot as he forces his body already quitting on him to boot the automatic systems into maintenance mode and initiate automated cooldown protocols fast enough to avoid irradiating the greater Savannah River Basin.

You couldn’t just turn off a nuclear power plant like a night-light.

It took years of careful, gradual processes to avoid any one of the thousand topics covered by quarterly safety drills.

The air here is always hot and wet. The bones of the man who stayed, slumped over the steam-pressure console, have grown new musculature, new skin, even new hair.

Moss and mold and delicate frilled fungi swell up that old suitcoat almost to the size of Tom’s former weekend rec-league physique.

Crew Chief Fortunado had submitted a fully documented formal complaint concerning the flaccid air-conditioning every single Friday of his career and not one thing ever changed.

He hated this place. The metallic taste of the recycled air.

The unsalted egg salad and pink sliced mystery meat in the cafeteria.

The oh-so-concerned protesters hollering at him outside the main entrance every goddamned day like he personally planned to drop a couple of megatons on Charleston during the morning meeting.

Tommy Fortunado hated this place. And now he’ll never leave it.

The round lights flash on his dead shoulders like owl’s eyes. Opening and closing. Opening and closing.

Green. White. Green. White. Then solid white, and, with an almost relieved pause, yellow.

Faster, Faster. Faster toward red. Weak, wheezy Klaxons sound in the dark stillness.

All the boards light up under the watchful eyes of beaming hard-hatted workers on a moldering workplace safety poster as they point purposefully into the middle distance, into the future:

At ONS We Power PROGRESS!

The temperature readouts inch past equilibrium. The skimmer wall separating the clean lake water from the contaminated cooling ponds quietly gives up its long fight. A shiver of blue light glows out of Oconee Nuclear Station, and it is not alone.

A few days from now, the deer drinking untroubled from the starlit water will die with their bellies full of tulip buds and sores ringing their soft white throats like ruby necklaces.

A few weeks after that, Catawba Nuclear Station goes.

It’s high summer before the Watts Bar Plant in Chattanooga and the Grand Gulf Station in Port Gibson, Mississippi, sound their death rattles.

By the time the millennium turns over, the American Southeast writhes in a wash of invisible, hungry fire that will not go out for four hundred years.

Everything expires.

There were many, many things wrong with Fern Ramsey.

She was stronger than most other people, including boys. She could rip a log in half with her bare hands, and not an old rotten one, either.

Coarse, silvery hair covered most all of her skin but palms and soles; not so thick as you’d notice it if you weren’t touching on someone you shouldn’t, but it was there all the same.

Her toes looked like ladies’ toes used to look from spending seventy years smashed up inside high heels, even though Fern hadn’t ever even seen high heels, let alone done that silliness to herself.

One of her eyes was a fair bit bigger and darker than the other, but she didn’t see so good out of that big boy.

And out of the nape of her neck, one single long, thin lock of brilliant white hair snaked out in all the black like a skunk’s stripe.

Despite all that, Fern Ramsey was uncommon pretty. All pretty really meant these days was people bothering all over her if ever they could catch her, which they usually could on account of those hoofed-up feet.

Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, Fern could make things, but only little things, happen just by thinking sharp enough. That’s what she called it, when she had to call it something. Thinking sharp. She didn’t understand why or how, but she was used to that.

Fern assumed she had parents at some point.

My stars, doesn’t everyone? But she didn’t remember any.

She didn’t remember where she started out in this big broken board game of a world.

She reckoned they died, but that wasn’t the problem.

Fern didn’t remember being little or learning to read or something bad happening to good old Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey.

She didn’t even remember ever specifically deciding to live her life walking instead of pedaling or galloping or skating, or none of the above, just circling this great last drain toward one of the teeny handful of places where people who still remembered how to be people went to be people at each other as long as they could stand it.

Walking just felt good. And Fern tried to only do things that felt good.

Like hunting critters rather than settling down and getting smart with a vegetable garden and a cow like an asshole.

Like giving squirrels or rabbits or minks cute names as soon as she spotted them in the brush so she could feel close and snuggly about them before gutting them herself and eating them raw in open-plan kitchens full of skeletons.