Page 128 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Grandfather Whale feeds them all. Houses them all.

Provides, as grandfathers will. Thousands of generations of species lay their eggs in his organs and his meat.

His corpse has so much to offer. It becomes a self-contained, fast-mutating, crowded ecosystem, and as long as the whalefall provides resources without end, no creature has reason to leave. Or to strive. Or to rise.

No creature living there ever guesses the whale is not the world.

No creature living in a cornucopia is capable of imagining the horn might one day lie empty.

The cold-jellied sea keeps Grandfather fresh for a long time. For two hundred years, the whalefall will be enough to sustain this little civilization. But nothing stays easy forever.

Everything expires.

Food isn’t a problem until it’s the only problem. The decadent bloat of modernity’s corpse had enough Twinkies, beef jerky, and canned soup for all.

Until it didn’t.

In the beginning, in the Age of Miracles, just the right people seemed to find their way to just the right places at just the right time, and, well, a fair whack of farmers was never much for social interaction before, either.

They took longer to get infected, longer to die.

Some fields got planted right quick, but most people were happy as horses to drink deep of the corpses of big-box grocery and department stores, gas station snack racks, bodegas and baked bean cannery floors, suburban developments with deep pantries.

But time ate there, too.

After a decade, the pickings are both slim and risky. Salmonella, listeria, trichinosis, the boys are all in town. This new wave of death stings deep. They were supposed to have made it. They were supposed to be home free.

It’s a bad winter. They’re all bad winters for a while. The whale is gone.

But the sea remains.

They learn again, but slowly. No one knows everything, but everyone knows something.

And they learn first how much sheer time it took to stay alive before the beneficence of Our Lady of Slim Jims. The cruel equation of how many calories it costs to acquire calories.

Seeding, planting, growing, harvesting, canning, drying, preserving.

Catching wild chickens for eggs. Figuring out where the mackerel gather and when it’s safe to dig for clams. Convincing a cow that this time you’re only going to steal milk from her baby, not steal from her baby and shoot her in the head with a bolt gun.

It all takes time. And calories no one has to spare.

Everything expires. Even the Age of Miracles.

Any given clutch of folk no longer invariably has a lucky skill-spread.

Tornadoes and hurricanes spin up again. Droughts, floods, dead topsoil.

And so many people try to make a go of it in places they’d always loved, chosen for sentiment, not for the longest growing seasons or the most fertile soil.

If a hand had briefly reached out to put things where they belonged, it had clearly pulled back again, as it always had, after a great flood or a great fire from heaven.

Grandfather Whale gave himself to sustain the deep. But the whale could not stay forever.

Fern Ramsey saw to her King before herself. She buried Sue on a rise overlooking the river where they fished and talked about mutation. It was all she could think of. They hadn’t had long enough to make many memories, and the others were already starting to tremble and squabble and disperse.

The hunt would come. The sharing of her pain with that girl in the woolly yellow socks. There was so much time. She was getting stronger, she could feel it. She could think sharp enough to pull anything she wanted to her.

But her arms and shoulders burned so bad when it was done Fern just sat down on the river moss and cried.

She couldn’t even feel that red-ponytail girl anymore, and the cold thing in her that wanted to make that girl scream loud enough to drown out her own hollering didn’t seem to care for manual labor. It was quiet, for now.

So quiet that the warm red sun and the finches in the trees and the soft meadow green under her cheek made her forget to run from sleep.

Fern doesn’t dream of the schoolhouse this time. She doesn’t dream of the empty black and red plain under the yellow sky.

Fern dreams of falling. Falling from such a great height.

Falling forever through night and glass and gravity.

She twists around in midair and sees another woman falling beneath her, before her, white fabric billowing around her great belly, long white hair billowing around her face.

The woman is so beautiful. So beautiful and so sad.

It stops Fern’s heart how beautiful the woman really is.

A misshapen hand presses nauseatingly up out of the woman’s swollen pregnant belly. She’s so far along. Ready to pop. The shape of the hand stretching her skin seems to reach for Fern. For someone. For life.

Then they all obliterate into the ground and Fern stands alone in an endless boiling land with only great black round stones to keep her company.

The handsome man isn’t there. The handsome man isn’t there and those aren’t stones. Fern runs her hand along one. She never thought to look at them before. Preoccupied, she supposed.

They’re haystacks. Black, gargantuan, harvested, rolled and bound.

A crow pecks the germ from the stalk. A crow out of nowhere.

“You’ve been busy,” it caws.

“Are you him?” Fern asks, trembling.

The bird chortles to itself. “Fuck, no. He’s occupado. He’s got a lot of work to do and you’re not helping with your little stunts. Maybe you shouldn’t play with the other children, Ferny. They seem to get upset.”

“Do you… work for him?”

The crow ruffled his feathers. “You can’t think of it like that.

I just am. I live. I notice. I remember.

The rules are lax right now. He’s still half-asleep.

My brothers and sisters and I roam. That’s why he can’t quite see you.

When he wakes fully, I won’t be able to help. Sorry. I am what I am. Just like you.”

Fern moved her hands into the deep, thick wheat. “Which is what?”

“An eye. A witness. A thought. A memory. And you are… a mutation.”

Fern recoiled from King Sue’s word.

“Because he’s right, you know.” The crow prodded his cast-iron beak up toward the sickly sky. “You’re all wrong. You’re not supposed to be here. You’re new.”

Fern laughed, and nothing had ever felt stranger to her than laughing in this place. “Well, yeah. I’m a kid.”

The crow gave a short, sharp screech of irritation.

“Not that . You’re completely new. The wheel turns, but it turns slowly.

And its spokes are many—but not infinite.

There is a number, and the number has changed.

This has happened many times. He rises, he falls.

He rises. Like the sun and tides. Everything comes around again.

And everyone. The saints and the devils, all the hands that turn the wheel.

They change faces, names, places. They remember, but slowly.

They do their part. They die in their turn.

And when he rises again, so do they to balance it.

“So it goes and so it has gone for time beyond time. But the thing you call the handsome man was so close last time. I don’t know.

I’m only an eye. Perhaps the thing he truly is never came so close to victory before.

He always takes a bride. He always gets a child upon her.

But perhaps the thing his last bride truly was never came so near to actually giving birth.

Her labor was almost upon her. Even as she fell. The prince was almost here.”

The cancerous sky ripped and snarled above them. The crow’s eyes glittered. “You were almost here.”

Fern’s hand froze on the bale of black wheat. “ Me? I don’t understand. Princes are boys .”

The crow’s ruff bristled. “Shhhhh. Don’t be stupid.

I hear his footsteps grinding the sea. There is not much time.

I told you. The wheel turns and faces change.

Faces, names, places… even bodies. What is a girl or a boy?

Only the difference between one thrust and the next.

The flip of a coin. He won’t like it one bit, I can tell you that much.

But it will interest him, and that’s worse.

Poor monster. You were never on the wheel before.

You never came so close to the world that the wheel could catch you.

And now you’re stuck with us. With no other lives to help you remember.

With no ancient role waiting for you. You are new .

And you’re broken. You are incomplete. You weren’t born.

You aren’t right. You were never meant for the wheel.

You are a mutation, a variant strain. You could be harmless.

Or you could be the last sickness of this world.

A Valkyrie in his army. His left-hand girl.

The final momentum that shatters the wheel into darkness.

Either way, you are his. But also your mother’s. Bad luck on both counts, really.”

Fern thought of the falling woman. Of the schoolteacher.

Their white hair like blank pages. Of the raccoon people scurrying and hissing and stealing and hiding from something none of them could name.

Of the great bonging bell in the white belfry, calling the children in.

Of the handsome man, how he smelled like home.

“I don’t know what any of that means,” she whimpered.