Page 130 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
THE DEVIL’S CHILDREN
Sarah Langan
Maple’s been missing north of a month. I want to pretend she’s okay. I want to pretend she ran away and that one day, I’ll join her. But the feeling inside me is queasy.
She’s not the only member of my kind to go missing.
They leave the mountains to check on the water supply or to deliver an altar offering, and we never hear from them again.
It’s possible they got Captain Trips and stayed away rather than infecting the rest of us.
Possible, too, that the infection hit them so hard and fast they didn’t have the time to radio news.
There are also mountain lions to consider.
These are heartless creatures; happy to chew even bones.
It’s autumn in California and the setting sun smears red rays across the San Gabriel Mountains.
My tribe has occupied this place since our treaty with the Chosen, who’ve proven capricious overlords.
On whims, they shrink our borders. They encroach, bringing sickness.
We’re too vulnerable and spread out to fight them. They get away with it.
Without Maple, I’ve been foraging alone.
The others have said nothing, knowing I’m not ready to replace my friend.
But tonight, the thing I’ve been dreading happens.
Ferris Landing approaches my camp. He’s a tall, slender man and he looks behind me instead of at me.
“I’ll gather with you tonight,” he whispers. Everyone in my tribe whispers.
Ferris isn’t suited for my work. He’s been known to pick poison oak instead of fennel, to scare small game with gangly feet.
In truth, he’s unsuited to any work. But it’s not the way of my tribe to tell people what to do.
He’s offered help. It’s my job to accept that help with grace and let him figure out whether he belongs.
“As soon as it’s dark,” I say.
Night comes hard and fast, that last of dusk burning into black. Ferris meets me at the path that was once Mulholland Drive. It’s beautifully eerie, a wild and ripe territory.
We’re not long before Ferris stops and calls, “Here?” to me in a whisper that’s louder than most. Everything about him is louder than it should be. But to my surprise, he’s found lamb’s quarters. They’re full of iron. More than deer meat, they thicken the blood.
“Yeah,” I say. “You got it.”
We gather those, then the beets and potatoes I planted with Maple on the wide flat overlooking dilapidated, ivy-riddled houses down in the valley that was once Studio City. He’s helpful, carrying everything, acting as a second, trying hard to intuit my next moves.
We finish sooner than expected and have time before we need to head back.
Ferris sits on a rock. He makes room for me, but I ignore this.
It’s impolite to stand close, to sit nearby.
Even family members avoid direct touch. He lights something whose tip smolders red.
It’s been two generations since Captain Trips, but the old-world graffiti is still carved into the granite. Laura loves John. Hollywood 4-Neva .
Ferris exhales a stinking cloud. He’s a misfit, which, in our group of ragtag survivors, is saying something. He always laughs too late. Always watches, but rarely speaks. Behind his back, we call him the Preacher.
“You’re kidding,” I say. “That’s a cigarette?”
He shrugs, sheepish, and I get the disturbing feeling that he’s planned this. Left our territory and braved the open to loot it from an overgrown and ivy covered 7-Eleven, been carrying the pack around since, waiting to show someone he’s a secret rebel.
He holds the cigarette. His voice is jarringly loud. “Want a drag?”
Has he forgotten that my mother died from a lump in her lung? That we live only a few hundred miles from the rubble of an A-bomb? That I used to have a best friend named Maple, and he’ll never take her place?
“You ass,” I whisper.
I stomp ahead toward camp. Soon, he’s trudging behind me, and I feel the thickness of his uncertainty as he mentally proposes and disposes of the words to mollify me. We walk in the quiet long enough that I realize I’m being hard on him. I miss Maple too much to want to have fun with anyone else.
Back at camp, we’re the last shift to eat. It’s our way to always do things in the smallest possible groups. Even confined to our limited territory, we keep apart.
There’s news first—what we’ve heard and related over the radio on a closed channel.
We learn that our tribe in Montana needs antibiotics, and our tribe in Texas has found uranium, which they hope to keep a secret from their local Chosen, who will surely want to loot that metal and resettle them, likely infecting them in the process.
We talk about those of our group who have gone missing. Aside from the practical possibilities, a few of my kind think it’s magic—some kind of rapturing. I doubt this. But they seem excited about the possibility. The more likely cause for our missing is something I don’t want to think about.
Before retiring for the dawn, we draw straws to decide who will deliver our seasonal GoodWill offerings to the Chosen. It’s a part of our treaty, token gifts that serve to humanize us, make us seem like people and not animals.
No one likes to make this dangerous trek, though lately, I’ve been itching to get out—to find Maple, but also just to leave.
To see something new. There’s a sameness to our life that has been gnawing on my sleep.
For how long are we expected to subsist on a dead and shrinking plot of land?
What is there to hope for, when your future is a noose pulled tight?
I draw a long straw. I should be happy, but something inside me is disappointed.
Then Ferris draws his short straw. Because I’m now his partner, this is also my short straw. I expect him to convey some kind of apology. Shrugged shoulders or sheepishness or even a whispered, Sorry ! My first day with him and I’m already screwed.
Instead, he looks at me, his brown eyes nearly as dark as his pupils, and smiles.
For as long as I can remember, there have always been two sides. There has always been us, and there has always been them, the Chosen, the future eaters, the generation swallowers, the monsters in plain sight.
I don’t remember Captain Trips; I was told by my mother who’d been told by her mother.
It came like thunder: a calamity, a terror.
A human-made plague of biblical proportions.
The only way to escape it was to escape humanity.
So that’s what my people did. They hid from the world, from the sickness, riding out that terror in solitude.
We came unfixed from everything we’d once been, everyone we’d once known, every hope we’d once had.
We gave these up and waited meekly, our sole intention to survive.
To outlast the virus and all who carried it.
Like birds after a storm, we would rise up in the quiet to inherit and remake the still-spinning earth.
But then, an unexpected thing. We were not alone.
Climbing out from the dead echo of wet coughs and stink, arose the immune.
People who carried the virus, who kept it alive inside them without ever getting sick.
Like newborns scraped clean of offense and tenderly raw, they walked out of houses and tunnels and prisons.
They wandered empty streets, calling names of fallen friends.
They mowed lawns half-naked and weeping, they jogged empty streets, reciting the names of the dead, they painted nostalgic landscapes against easels.
They drank, they told terrible stories and wept and laughed and healed even as our own blight was still happening.
And finally, they gathered. In ways we could not possibly do, they gathered.
My peripatetic, wandering people watched them, eyes in tall grass and behind buildings; eyes looking down from rooves and peering up from cellars.
The immune measured their survival in days, blessed their luck on stars like new gods even as they carried the sickness.
It lived inside them, a time bomb, a nuke, a scrap of nucleic acid gone mutated and rogue.
They could kill us with a word. A plosive letter P ; a whistle. A whisper.
Months. A year. The immune turned the lights back on. They danced to dead music. They joked about old movies and convenience stores. They cleaned all the mess, but made new, mushroom cloud messes.
We stayed wandering. In order to survive, we learned to sleep by day and live by night.
To stay quiet. To whisper. To avoid touch.
Over time, we began to think of ourselves as less than human.
We watched the living, the immune, pull weeds and tinker and fix.
They slept in beds. They wore cadaver bands of gold around their ring fingers.
Captain Trips had stopped human progress.
Slowly and with great pain, the Chosen started it up again.
They rebuilt. They powered tiny screens and big screens and medium screens and oh so many screens.
They dammed the water. They bred the livestock.
They opened the glutton restaurants and offices for angry, passionate men.
They had children and more children and even more children.
They made it their job to repopulate the earth.
Some of those children were born without immunity, but most survived.