Page 126 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
Layla knows the small ones are not migrating or gathering somewhere good and warm to mate in sight of water.
They are gone. Mostly. The ones that matter are all gone.
Because only two ever mattered. The rest were nothing.
Gazelles. Silly, fast, plentiful, quick to vanish.
She misses the sounds their tininess made when they said , Layla.
The ones that mattered were called Amir and Zara.
They liked so much to feed and pat her in the Otherwhile.
When she sprayed water toward them, they made sounds with their soft faces.
Sounds like that meant a small one was unhungry and uncold and unlost, so Layla tried to make them do it all the time, because those were good things to be.
Amir and Zara always smelled like an oasis.
Like a thousand animals feasting on their foods and waters, and that was also good.
Sometimes Amir brought other elephants to meet her, but Layla bit them until they went away.
Zara taught her to make a yellow flower with a stick and colormud, which was the most fun Layla ever had.
She could only ever make the flower the way Zara liked to, not her own way, but the littleness that was Zara clapped and jumped and made big squeaks every time all the same.
Amir and Zara together smelled like rain, which was the smell of how they loved each other.
For an elephant, rain on the way means babies want to be made.
It means the time has come to get much, much bigger than you were before.
Layla used to watch Amir and Zara in the zebraworld across the longpath from her.
Their trunks were always twined together, even though they didn’t have any.
They trumpeted a sound at each other very often.
Not a name, but something Layla came to understand meant the tusking and ramming were all done and they had chosen each other.
Sayang. She gave her calf the smallname of Sayang, even though smallnames were buried in the Otherwhile under leaves and grass forever.
Amir and Zara smelled like rain when they died, too.
When they went world to world to world down the longpaths and opened them up so everyone could run from the hunter that made their insides leak out of their faces.
When they put boards over the ringwater around Layla’s pen, even though she knew she wasn’t allowed to cross the water.
They smelled like rain when they held on to each other and turned wet and red, and they still did when Layla rammed all the young trees she could find and laid their branches across the tininess of Amir and Zara so they could migrate with their trunks braided together forever.
Fern hadn’t always hoofed it alone. She knew where to get company if she wanted company. Everyone did. A few dozen settlements scattered around, a dozen towns, maybe three cities, if you were feeling generous about the definition of city .
It just wasn’t worth it, to her mind. You had to pull up short and get real careful once words like town started flying around.
Towns never lasted. One, or a handful of stragglers alone, sure.
Cities, maybe, if they managed to lottery up just exactly the right spread of brains and brawn at the starting gun.
But towns were just so friable . They always tore themselves to shit, or threw themselves against another town until both shredded into confetti. That was most of what happened to every patch of dirt that aimed to boot up being unwild again after the big crash.
Or maybe just the ones Fern strolled through.
Sometimes folks didn’t actually do a whole lot wrong. Nobody stole or hoarded or feuded or made the powerfully bold choice to fuck somebody else’s man when there wasn’t really any compelling reason not to pick up a gun about that anymore. But the town burst like a rotten grapefruit all the same.
When Fern went down to Maybe, Vermont, last summer, she was perfectly fucking polite to the guy minding the potatoes he planted in the town square’s flower beds and dried-up fountain bowl.
Hey, mister, Dr. Martinez at the sick tent said you had more of those Yukons than you need, wanna trade?
I got a jar of buttons and half a pound of skunk jerky.
The potato man narrowed his eyes and turned his back like she’d pissed in his dirt fountain.
Like she wasn’t even there . Pretended like he was actually doing something with that stupid trowel of his.
A few days later, the potato man climbed up to the water tower his own grandfather had worked so hard to reconnect to the municipal system and drowned his idiot raccoon self in there.
His rot came out in sinks and bathtubs and gurgling up drains and after all those years keeping their backs against the wheel, the last to leave painted a big X over the blue smiley face on the big boulder outside town that once announced the water was safe, and that was just about it for Maybe, Vermont.
By the time the potatoes came in, the houses all stood empty, the sick tent collapsed, and Fern got her spuds for free.
Oh well.
Fern liked it pretty fine in Wherever, Pennsylvania, for a while.
She wasn’t fantastic at people, but she was little and alone and that rarely added up to a consistently good time.
You had to try. She even met a boy there her own age who called himself Big Barry Bullfrog.
People called themselves any old thing nowadays.
But Barry was nice enough. He knew how to sew (sutures included) and raise Helsinki on an eldritch hand-crank CB radio he strapped into an ugly orange vinyl trailer and hauled up hills behind his bike to get a good signal.
They lay out under the April stars. After Barry coaxed a charge through the hand-crank, Fern held somebody’s hand for the first time. She didn’t really like it. And it went on forever . Barry laced his fingers through hers and they felt like old hot dogs. The radio crackled through the channels.
“I don’t think I believe you can really talk to somebody on the other side of the ocean with that thing.” Fern sniffed.
“Sure you can. I talk to Petteri all the time. Well, when it works.”
Fern could not imagine making this much effort just to talk to a person. Talking to people was enough effort all by itself. “What do you talk about?” she said in genuine bafflement.
“Nothing. I don’t know. Comic books. He likes a bunch of French stuff from when he was a kid I never heard of. One time he read me a recipe for reindeer pizza. That was cool.”
“That’s it?”
Big Barry Bullfrog lowered his voice as if they weren’t half a mile outside the settlement and anyone would care if they did hear.
“Once Petteri told me what happened to his grandfather in Rome,” he said softly.
“He doesn’t like to talk about it. He says nobody does.
Like Vegas over here. I asked Petteri how close his granddad was when it happened, but he just kept saying close enough.
His pops lost all his hair even on his legs, and he told Petteri it looked like a swan’s wing.
A swan’s wing made of fire, reaching across the river of Tuonela to sweep the world of the living into the land of the dead.
He said that’s out of the Kalevala. I think that’s a book.
Petteri’s old. He’s hard to follow sometimes. ”
“I don’t like that story,” Fern said to the stars. “It sounds made-up.”
“It’s not,” the kid said flatly.
He took his hot dog hand back and Fern didn’t care. The radio didn’t give up the goods that night. Petteri and Helsinki slept in a sea of static.
The morning the first cherry blossoms opened, before anyone got up for chores, Big Barry Bullfrog marched through town with a full box of matches and set fire to the library.
He stood there smiling and watching it burn with his hands stuck in his back pockets, and that crazy stupid raccoon didn’t even move when the flames jumped the courtyard and took him, too.
But maybe Wherever, Pennsylvania, could’ve kept going without being able to learn how to build anything so easy ever again.
Except, after the fire, half the town started coughing and wheezing and glaring furiously at the other half over their useless cupped hands.
They hid in their houses and died anyway or lit out before they could find out if they got lucky twice.
Paying the price of gathering two or more together.
Human bodies still got the big sick from time to time, and they still died.
Human bodies still got the big sick quite a damned bit, in point of fact, and they still died all the fucking time .
That happened a lot when Fern tried to join the civilized world. Or it had ripped through just before she got there. Or right after she left.
But the worst was Wisconsin. The farthest west Fern ever dared.
Probably, Wisconsin, a sweetheart of a hamlet ruled by a hard, smart, weather-beaten old warlord named King Sue.
King Sue had two big industrial storage containers, spray-painted in black across the sides: one said NEED , one said WANT .
You do right by the King, she’d bang the steel-curtain door with her fist and it’d roll up on heaven.
One packed to the brim with Tampax for every flow, the other with case after case of name-brand cigarettes.
Christ, they were just so beautiful. Fern almost wept the first time she stood in the presence of NEED and WANT .
That, plus lots and lots of milk bottles sloshing with corn alcohol she made herself in the engine block of a Buick carcass and a shit ton of guns, was how Sue got to be King of a couple of square miles of dirt and a legend everywhere else.