Page 132 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

“Why did Mattie leave you?” I ask.

“Because I talked like this,” he answers. “Odd little preacher.”

A few miles later, dawn breaks. We’re lucky and are close to the halfway house, a place restricted from the Chosen. Shelter from the rain.

Ferris is loud here, too. He grunts when he changes and grunts when he bends even though he’s a young man.

The two beds are across the room from each other.

I want to suggest one of us take watch, but there’s something thick between us that I’m afraid to broach.

I find my eyes open, looking at him; him looking back at me.

While we’re sleeping, the worst thing happens. The door opens. The Chosen break treaty and enter. I’m so scared it’s like alarms are screaming inside me. This is everything I’ve ever feared. I can’t run. They’re blocking the door. I can’t breathe. I’ll die.

Really, that’s the only option. I’ll die. So will Ferris.

They come closer and they’re so clean. Even their fingernails are clean. I can’t hold it in anymore. I breathe. They smell like chemicals. The whole room is filled with the scent of too-sweet flowers.

I’m too focused on what’s right in front of me to notice Ferris, though distantly I hear struggle. Wet skin, fighting sounds. They’re hurting him.

“Easy,” the one closest to me says, like I’m a wild animal. “Easy does it.”

I lunge, but there are hands holding me down. There’s a needle. Everything goes black.

I wake up in a long, clean room with hard, shining floors and two rows of beds, headboards against the walls.

Only two of the beds are occupied. Over us stand the clean Chosen, all wearing white coats.

I’m awake, but Ferris’s eyes are closed.

I’m waiting for the tickle in my throat. The swell in my ears. Captain Trips.

A man with white hair comes closer. Like a baby, he has no hair on his face. His breath is chemical and cinnamon. “Do you speak?” he asks. “Do you understand me?”

I glare, holding my breath.

“You’re exposed. Go ahead and breathe, dear.”

I lunge for him, realizing only then that my feet are bound.

He shows no alarm. Barely flinches. His voice is loud.

Louder even then Ferris’s. But he’s not talking to me.

The people around him are students, apparently.

Or else some kind of audience. “We injected her with both live virus and vaccine, but she’s shown no sign of infection. Very promising.”

They mutter, an excited thrum.

“This is the first time we’ve seen any immunity at all?” one asks.

The old man shakes his head. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as old as him. Our people die much sooner. Nonetheless, he appears healthy, his joints still full of cartilage, his skin lively. “We’ve come close before. But as I said… promising.”

Then he walks to the next bed. “This one has a hundred-and four-degree fever. It’s not as progressed as we’d expect from an active infection, but it’s still a fever. I’ll need hematology to run panels for everything relevant, looking particularly at the Trips protein-antibody interaction.”

Then they turn. I’ve given up lunging and am openly untying my binds, which are simple and well-knotted bedsheets attached to the metal frame. The old guy pays no attention, but a few of the interns watch with curiosity as the group of them heads out. A door closes with a click and they’re gone.

They’re not worried I’ll escape, which I find alarming. Are people in my position usually too sick by now to run or fight?

I get the knots off and am free, about to follow them to the door and show them the sort of damage my kind can commit, when something thin and sweet trickles through the air.

It falls, heavier than atmosphere and just slightly orange.

It’s coming from the narrow, slatted metal boxes in the ceiling.

I try not to breathe it, because it spins me, makes me heavy. I fight, but my heads sinks back.

As I doze, I see a list of names carved into the steel footboard of the bed opposing mine.

We were here

Len

Islis

Fran

Soo

Mattius

Lip

Drift

My eyes unfocus and I force them back. I force myself back right before it all goes black again. I see a final name:

Maple.

For the first time in memory, I sleep during the night and wake at dawn. My bedsheets are knotted again, my ankles bound and tied to the bedpost. It’s humanely done. Not very tight.

The people in white have returned. They’re taking Ferris’s blood.

He’s awake and coughing, his hair slicked with sweat.

I try to act like I’m not scared for him; this isn’t serious.

I have you , I want to tell him. We’re on the same team and that makes you mine.

But it’s too personal a thing to say with words.

His eyes find purchase in me and his breathing relaxes. His wheezing becomes less pronounced.

“They injected us with Captain Trips and an experimental vaccine,” I say. “I’m not sick yet so there’s a chance you’ll get better.”

“So, you do understand us,” the old man says. “We weren’t sure which tribe you came from. Some of them are mutes.”

“You’re in violation of the treaty,” I say.

He looks at the side of my bed as if considering sitting there, but thinks better of it. “Did you know that the children of the immune are not always immune? We need this, too. It’s for all of us.”

He keeps talking. There are more words, about society and survival. About everyone doing their part. About rebuilding and getting back what we’ve lost. They’re meaningless. I’m thinking instead about how Ferris called them monsters. I’m thinking he was right.

Then they’re gone. It only occurs to me later that the old man’s voice was more nasal than yesterday.

Breakfast is delivered by more people in white. One of them sneezes, twice.

Once they’re gone, I work on my binds, getting loose.

I’m up then. The hall is just that. Two rows of beds that end on one side in a wall and the other in a locked, windowed door.

Outside that door, people in white have congregated.

I hear words like cure and breakthrough and economic viability .

It’s bright out there, a white sun, and they’re too loud.

I can’t imagine enduring a world so loud.

Back at the beds, Ferris shakes with fever. The whites of his eyes have turned red with blood. My instinct is to hide from him. To cocoon myself with sheets on the far side of the room. I’m so scared of infection. But there is another instinct, too. I like Ferris. I don’t want him to be alone.

“Stay ’way from me,” he coughs.

“Yeah,” I say. Then I do something I’ve never done before. Not with anyone, ever. I climb into his bed. Our bare legs touch.

I spend the day nursing Ferris and plotting an escape. My plan is to break out once they’re not paying attention. Carrying Ferris out will be the tough part. It would make more sense to leave him behind. But my chance to escape hasn’t yet occurred, so I haven’t had to make that decision.

Once I leave, I won’t be able to go home. Even if I don’t die, I’m probably a carrier.

Hunger outweighs any fears I have that the food is infected with some new terror. It’s toast and jam and butter; eggs and fresh meat and bright orange juice. I can understand why they mistake themselves for gods; they eat like them.

Ferris manages a few sips of juice, but not much else.

Midday, the door opens again. People in white enter. Several are coughing. They draw Ferris’s blood.

We sit together into the night and at some point fall asleep.

I’m awoken with the feeling of something cold and wet.

“Oh no!” Ferris cries.

Blood, I think. He’s bleeding out. It’s the final stage. But my eyes adjust. He’s slick all over, dripping sweat. The heat coming off of him is gone. His fever has broken.

“It’s so gross. I’m so sorry!” he whispers.

It’s not like I thought. I’m not repulsed. I’m just happy he’s alive. Happy I won’t have to escape without him.

“You’re crying. Oh no, please don’t cry,” he says.

And it takes a second—I don’t understand what he’s talking about, before I realize that I really am crying. But it’s not sadness. It’s relief.

The next morning, the old doctor comes with his friends in white.

They’re all sick now, and all the assistants are sick, too.

The old man can hardly stand. The veins in his sclera have popped and broken, red blood swelling under a layer of tight skin.

The assistants hold us down and take our blood.

They’re so out of it they don’t notice that Ferris is better.

They lock the door behind them, but they forget to bind us or put sleep gas through the vents.

We walk to the end of the hall, watching them through the glass window.

The old man falls to the ground. He shakes with seizure, mouth foaming, then goes still.

I’ve seen this before in my own people and know already, even as the staff surrounding him perform CPR and check his pulse, that he’s dead.

“Looks like they invented a new variant,” Ferris says.

“And it kills them, but not us?” I ask.

We stand at the glass, looking out. The attendants in white notice us then. Their expressions confuse me. Slowly, I realize they’re afraid.

We stay in the room for the following twenty-four hours while Ferris rebuilds his strength.

No one comes back to check on us after the doctor’s death.

We watch out the window as the hospital fills ominously with coughing people, sick people.

We hear the cacophony. And then, just as quickly as the coughing started, it goes quiet.

It happens with a snap, or the strike of thunder. Everything is still.

We break the window, reach down and unlock the door from the outside.

There are bodies on the floor, bleeding out from eyes and mouths and ears, staining white uniforms and floors red. I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen lots of bad things. But that doesn’t make any of it easy.

I’m holding Ferris’s hand. Or maybe he’s holding mine. How do these things start? I don’t know. We’re out a main door and down the steps. It’s daylight. We’re exposed for all the town to see. But the people are gone. The cars are still. The town, once teeming, is silent.

“Are they all dead?” I ask.

Ferris looks up toward the roof of a large mansion. Something moves. A human blur charges around a corner, but it doesn’t go far. I feel its watching eyes.

The vantage has shifted. We have become the immune.

We gather food, but otherwise don’t spend long.

Ferris wants to investigate, to wander their stores, to eat fresh fruit and meet their animals—their cats and livestock.

To read their books. But it’s dangerous to linger.

They might have guns. We leave through the gate we must have been carried through, pass the altar, now empty.

They took our offerings just like they took us.

The rest at the death hospital has healed my blister. Sometimes Ferris leans on me, sometimes I lean on him. We walk until we’re at the halfway house. We rest there.

“Why did you volunteer to help me forage?” I ask.

“I like you.”

Except by necessity, I’ve avoided paying attention to other people.

It opens too many doors. Like Maple or my mom, they might die and I don’t want to have to mourn them.

If I’m loyal to them, I might have to sacrifice more than I can afford.

But it occurs to me that he’s been paying attention. The Preacher.

“Why?” I ask.

“You get things done,” he says. “Other people, they just pretend. Or they do as little as they can. Our whole group is falling apart. You don’t seem to notice. From the outside, it looks like you do that because you have hope.”

I can’t evaluate this. I don’t have the perspective to know whether it’s hope or animal instinct that keeps me going. But I like that he thinks so highly of me. “They killed our missing,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “They did. They stole them like lab rats and then murdered them.”

“They killed Maple. They killed my friend.”

There are tears in his eyes. I know he wasn’t attached to Maple. I know he’s feeling this for me. And somehow, that opens and breaks something inside me. I’m crying. I’m crying so loud. It’s like screaming.

He’s there. A witness. He doesn’t tell me to be quiet or to stop. And so I keep going. I cry for Maple and the missing. I cry for my people. I cry for my mom. I cry for misunderstood Ferris. I cry for myself.

What happens next isn’t an accident. Taking off our clothing and coming together, we choose it.

I’ve never done it before, and neither has he.

It’s a surprise, how much I enjoy it. I feel different afterward.

I feel like there was something wrong, something undone and sorrowful, that is gone. It’s his nearness that drives it away.

The halfway house has a radio, and that morning, we let our people know what happened. They decide to take a risk. They send an envoy of two to meet us. This envoy hesitates as it passes through the threshold of the halfway house. We all do.

It’s terrifying and momentous and oh so quiet as they walk inside and breathe our air.

When Ferris and I decide where to sleep with our newcomers, we have the option of pretending there is nothing between us. These kinds of relations are frowned upon and impractical. I find myself afraid of losing him, and tether myself closer.

Quickly, our friends get sick. But like Ferris, two days later, they are healed. Immune.

Leaning on one another, learning love without ever saying the word, Ferris and I make a kind of pilgrimage together. We spread our immunity to Montana and Texas. We spread it wherever it’s needed.

Nine months later, my child is born. The child is immune.

We consider packing our things and moving to any of the now-occupied territories. Taking over, murdering with a word. Undoing everything the Chosen have built. But we choose instead to remain the quiet ones.

Our numbers grow. Surge, even. We respect the new treaty, have stolen no lands. The difference is not on the outside, but within. We gather now. We know the feel of skin. We laugh, our voices no longer caged.

You Chosen ones now relegated to small territories, you Petty Gods who turned the lights no one wanted back on.

You day walkers banished now, to night, hear a story: Once, you steered a ship.

You broke the ship and unknowingly jettisoned us from it.

You returned to the ship, learning nothing. Changing nothing. Seeing nothing new.

You did not understand that we were the new. God’s rejects were the change. We will remake the world into a thing you do not recognize. We will remake the world into a thing that works.