Page 13 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY

Bryan Smith

A week and a half or so into the plague (he’d lost track of the days), having had enough of sitting alone in the silent urban mausoleum that the house he’d grown up in had become, Corey Adams decided to go for a walk.

He was a seventeen-year-old kid who should have been enjoying a final carefree summer before beginning his senior year of high school, but now he wasn’t going to have a senior year.

Captain Trips, the superflu, had seen to that.

Before leaving the house, he’d slouched for hours on the sofa in the dark living room, staring at the test pattern on the Zenith television with a glassy-eyed, slack-jawed expression.

He felt numb and hollowed-out, an immobile, mannequin-like shell masquerading as a human being, rendered temporarily incapable of movement or coherent thought.

He was a bit high from the weed he’d been smoking, but he was also in a state of emotional shell shock.

The entire world was collapsing. His last friend in the world, his very best friend, was gone, and for that he had only himself to blame.

Other significant losses had occurred, terrible losses, but those things were always beyond his control.

But the loss of Bluto, his German shepherd?

That was on him. Only on him.

Slowly, little by little, he began to emerge from this state of absolute disconnection, and as he began to come back to himself, his first thoughts coalesced around a single, surreal concept.

Am I real? Am I an actual person? Is any of this happening, or am I merely an actor on a shabby, cheap stage, waiting to enact his next scene in some overwrought drama?

It was a disorienting way to think. It was even more disorienting to realize he had no satisfactory answers to any of those questions.

Even worse, he suspected his stage drama analogy was inapt, because in truth he wasn’t anything as significant as an actor in a play.

He was, at best, a background extra, an unnoticed, minor part of the scenery.

The phone wasn’t ringing, no one had come knocking on the door, and no one would, because there was no one left in this world who gave one shit about him.

He left the front door ajar as he left the house, an act of supreme apathy reflective of his despairing state of mind.

Now that everything had gone so drastically awry and society itself was crumbling, all the usual security concerns struck him as irrelevant.

Everyone had bigger worries now, even all the homeless alcoholics and two-bit criminals.

He doubted anyone would bother looting the house at this point, but if they did, so fucking what?

He rambled about for a considerable period, with only the dimmest awareness of the actual amount of time passing.

Not many people were out and about as he traipsed up and down the neighborhood’s bright white sidewalks, baking in the heat of the relentless summer sun.

Only an occasional car went whizzing by in the streets.

This was a normally bustling neighborhood adjacent to Vanderbilt University, but a lot of the people he’d typically encounter walking around in the middle of the day were likely dead now.

Or, like his sister, they’d fled the city.

A voice cried out from somewhere nearby shortly after Corey veered away from the sidewalk to begin cutting through Mackey Park, but it didn’t fully register.

An unconscious impulse was steering him, spurring him to take a shortcut back toward home.

The city was too quiet now, that constant urban background din too distressingly absent.

In its own way, this absence of the normal drone felt as oppressive as the silence of the house.

Also, worst of all, he’d seen too many dead dogs.

They were everywhere. On sidewalks and in a lot of the yards he’d passed, others reduced to pulpy smears of crimson roadkill.

Every such glimpse triggered grim thoughts regarding Bluto’s unknown fate.

It hurt to think about it. Losing track of his dog was the kind of thing that simply would not have been possible prior to this unraveling of things, and the pain of having allowed it to happen was at least as great as the pain imparted by the other losses he’d endured in recent days.

That same voice cried out again, louder now, closer, but he was too lost in thought to take much note of it.

He walked with his head down, his eyes focused on the park’s bright green grass, a healthy shade that struck him as faintly obscene given the city’s otherwise pervading atmosphere of grinding dread and slow-motion doom.

Things had changed so much so quickly, a whirlwind of upheaval so extreme he sometimes wondered if he’d slipped out of the world he’d inhabited all his life and into some alternate dimension or universe, a nightmarish dreamscape from which he could not escape.

Deep down, though, he knew that wasn’t true, because when he slept at night, the real nightmares came, repeatedly taunting him with unnerving visions of a dark man, a strange, evil sorcerer of some type with an all-seeing red eye.

The feeling of foreboding the visions elicited was only marginally counterbalanced by the foggier dreams of the old woman in Nebraska.

Less than a week ago, his formerly hale and hearty father started sniffling and sneezing.

A summer cold, he called it. Not the superflu.

Three days later, he was in his death throes, moaning and squirming miserably on sweat-soaked sheets, muttering and hallucinating, saying things to people who weren’t there, some of whom had been dead for years.

Then, shockingly fast, he was gone.

Corey’s stepmother, Linda, succumbed to the same symptoms just two days later, less than twenty-four hours after transporting her husband over to Baptist Hospital, where he’d been treated like a disposable piece of meat, shunted aside with the rest of the sick and dying.

The family of four was reduced by half, leaving just Corey and his older sister, Angie.

The siblings were distraught, reeling with grief and terrified by the lack of options available to them.

There was nowhere to turn to for help, no one they could ask for guidance, because by then all the adults in their world were sick. Or already dead.

They sat and watched news reports on the Zenith.

The government was trying hard to reassure people, but it was evident something really fucked up was going down, some heavy truth the powers that be desperately wanted to keep hidden.

A vaccine was being promised, but Corey believed in that about as much as he believed in Santa Claus.

“They think we’re blind,” Angie had said two days ago while they sat in the living room and smoked weed. “Blind and stupid.”

Then today his sister was gone. Not dead. Just gone.

She left a note, and that’s all it said.

I’m gone.

She didn’t even sign it.

He spent some miserable time wondering how she could do that, just walk away without a proper goodbye, without inviting him along, leaving him alone with the corpse of their stepmother moldering away in the master bedroom upstairs.

An ungenerous person would describe what she’d done as a supremely selfish act, and for a time he was exactly that type of ungenerous.

He was pissed at her, but he also understood.

Their home was a tomb, a tainted repository of broken dreams and sullied memories.

The circumstances were almost unspeakably bleak, but even so, he thought he might have been able to bear up a while longer with Bluto at his side.

But the dog was gone, too, departed to points unknown.

Against his will, his thoughts again became laser-focused on his beloved missing pet, particularly in regard to how he hadn’t even realized the animal had disappeared until probably hours after he was gone.

A little while ago, he’d emerged from the mental fog engulfing him long enough to go into the bathroom and take a piss, and on his way back into the living room he happened to glance over at the sliding glass door that led out to the patio and the backyard.

Instead of returning to the sofa and resuming his impersonation of a person in a vegetative coma, he stopped and stared out at the yard, feeling like something was wrong without quite being able to put his finger on what it was.

Then it came to him and he felt that twist in his guts.

No. Nonono .

Corey ran outside and glanced around. Seeing no sign of the dog, he dashed around to the side of the house, pulling up short at the gut-wrenching sight of the gate that went out to the front yard standing open.

Right away, he understood what must have happened.

He’d let Bluto out in the morning, mere minutes before discovering Angie’s earth-shattering note.

Reeling from his sister’s act of desertion, that loss of his final remaining anchor to normality and sanity, he’d become mired in self-pity, spending the whole damn day glued to that stupid fucking sofa, stunned into insensibility by all he’d lost. At some point during the day, while he smoked the last of his weed and wallowed in misery and depression, maybe nodding off now and then, someone had come along and let the dog out of the yard.

Why? Who knew? It might have been a malicious act.

Or some well-meaning animal lover might have spotted Bluto through the chain-link fence and set him free, perhaps on the assumption that his owners were as dead as practically everyone else in the city.

What troubled him most was the lack of a knock at the door that surely would’ve come from anyone with good intentions.

Maybe they did , a voice from a traitorous part of his mind ventured, taunting him, twisting that metaphorical knife. Maybe someone knocked and you were too out of it because you’re too much of a stoner loser to cope with what’s happening like a normal person .