Page 135 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

The man is holding a bow and arrow, nocked and pointed straight at them.

The taller one whispers, “Wait. My prince—”

The archer growls back: “ No one is to be trusted here, Dennis. Don’t you understand where we are?”

“I know, but, begging your pardon—remember what you told me? About the dreams? What if these are among the good? What if they can help us find the next door?”

“This world is dead and crumbling! We can’t waste time on more traps! His stench is all around us.”

Both men look—and sound—utterly mad. Taxed to the breaking point. But the second man, Dennis, seems a little more grounded. Solicitous, at the very least. Ezra addresses him. “Hey. We’re not—”

“Of whom do you dream?” Dennis interrupts quickly, as if to outpace the arrow his companion plans to fire.

Ezra blinks. “Huh?”

“Answer quick! I am Dennis, son of Brandon. This is Peter, prince of Delain. We have traveled far and—”

“— We have been forgotten! ” The one named Peter cries, full of bitter rage. “ We have been abandoned! And we cannot stay in this place! ” His arrow hand pulls back farther.

“Please!” Dennis urges. “Tell us. Are you with him or not?”

Ezra begins to stammer. “I—I don’t know who, or what you’re—”

“Did you say ‘door’ earlier?” Susie asks abruptly. All eyes whip to her. “You’re looking for a door? What kind of door?”

The archer relaxes his arrow the tiniest bit. Reads something in Susie’s expression. “You know of them? The doors between?”

Susie swallows. “I think… Maybe?”

“Have you one of those damnable pink tablets, as well?” Dennis asks, voice low. “The ones holding all the stories—”

“ Hush ,” Peter snaps, then turns his glare back to Susie. “The door. Tell me. We haven’t much time. This world is unstable. Its beams are—”

As if to prove his point, before he can finish the earth begins to shake again. Supplies tumble off shelves. The fluorescent lights stutter and spark.

Everyone cries out in surprise.

Peter rushes for Susie. Grabs her. Begins to shake her. “Quickly! Where was it?! Tell me what you know! Tell me before it’s too—”

Ezra swings his heavy duffel full of cans at the lunatic’s head. The man goes down, hard. His companion rushes to his side. “My prince!”

His prince is moaning nonsense words—beam, quake, door, tower, and with especial adamance, flag, flag, flag—all while the store spits its inventory onto the floor.

Ezra can’t stand to hear any more of it.

He runs out the gas station door, across the undulating asphalt, past the swaying, shaking gas pumps.

Susie catches up with him down the road. Panting. “Wait! Wait up!”

He doesn’t. But she’s young and he can’t outpace her for long.

His head throbs. With the sun, the stress, the strange litany of words that crazy vagrant was spouting. Also, with that noise in the distance. Is it louder now? He wants to ask Susie if she hears it, too, but decides he’d rather not know. This is all starting to feel too…

Irrational.

Tiny threads, sprouting up across the surface of reality, begging to be pulled.

Nothing good can come from pulling threads like those. Better to leave them alone. Better to stay in as close to silence as they can.

Susie doesn’t let that happen for long, though.

“We could’ve talked some sense into them. Or maybe I could’ve.”

“So go back and join them if you want to,” he snaps. “You didn’t have to follow me.”

Back to silence. Then she stops walking.

“It’s just… they kept talking about a door.”

“Susie,” he groans, and stops, too. “I don’t know where you’re going with this but—”

“ I’ve been dreaming about a door,” she says. “I might have even seen—”

“I don’t wanna hear this!” He turns and continues on without her. She calls after him.

“Where is everybody, Ezra? Where are all the bodies? Why is it so empty here?”

We have been forgotten.

He stops again, exasperated. Looks up at the sky. Those linear clouds, even more jagged in places than earlier. The sun is finally beginning to dip low, smearing everything with wild magenta.

And that noise. That damn noise. Definitely louder now.

“This is an isolated area,” he says back to her, jaw clenched. “That’s why I drove here in the first place!”

“Okay. But. Hear me out. Please.” She takes a few steps toward him.

“After my friends died… I was all alone, and… The thing is, man, I hated my friends. They treated me like dog shit. Especially Bernie. I mean, I thought about killing them all the time—and I’m not saying this to skeeve you out, I’m just saying that’s how bad it was, okay?

I didn’t kill them. Captain Trips did. But then I figured I might as well just…

kill myself, right? I mean, I still wanted to kill something.

So, I got really drunk, and I got really high, and I broke into our old high school to, y’know, do the deed, because that felt nice and dramatic.

The place was totally empty, and I’m wandering down the halls, thinking about how shitty my friends were and how pissed I am that this is how my life turned out and why couldn’t I have been born in a different world, or at least gotten a fucking taste of how things could have been different, and I round this corner and…

and there’s this door. Like, a freestanding door.

In the middle of the hallway. Where there shouldn’t be a door. ”

“Susie.”

“Just listen. It had this weird, long number written on it, with dashes, kinda like a phone number, but not. No idea what it meant, but… Well, I was already ready for an ending, so I figured, ‘What the hell,’ and I opened it up and next thing I knew, I was in—I don’t even know, where is this, Colorado? ”

He doesn’t correct her. He’s too busy not thinking about the numbers he scrawled on the drawing inside his jacket pocket.

“Ever since I got here,” she continues, “I’ve been so…

disoriented. Things feel off, don’t they?

Nothing sounds right. Nothing tastes right.

And every time I close my eyes, I still see that door.

That fucking door , man! What if it’s the same door they were talking about?

Or… I dunno, what if I really did kill myself?

What if that guy was right and this is the land of the dead? ”

“He didn’t say that !” Ezra yells, appalled. “He was rambling nonsense. Both of them! Come on, Susie, did they sound compos mentis to you? Talking like they’re in a, a fantasy novel or something?”

“No.”

“No! Just a couple of mentally ill hobos! As for your ‘door,’ you said it yourself. You were high! And drunk!”

“But… how did I get here?”

He throws his hands up in frustration. “You’ve been through a trauma! You blacked out! Maybe you hitchhiked! Or you got kidnapped! Or you just walked! Like this!”

He turns away from her, starts walking once more. Huffing. Desperate to end this idiocy.

She calls after him. “What about all the earthquakes, Ezra? And seriously… where are all the bodies? Remember how many there were, all piling up?”

We have been forgotten. Abandoned.

Far up ahead, a building on the hilly horizon. The park station.

He swallows. “There’s an explanation!” he says. “There’s always an explanation!”

“What if the explanation is we’re dead?!” She has to shout after him now. “What if this is purgatory?! Or what if this is all some sort of fever dream in my head and I’m just waiting for the lights to go—”

“NO!” He turns back to actually scream at her, throat grinding. “Dreams don’t mean anything! And we’re not dead! We’re alive! We survived! We exist! GODDAMMIT, I EXIST!”

Feeling a little better having yelled all that, he walks in silence.

Eventually, she hurries to catch up with him.

They find Ezra’s father, singing, inside the visitor’s entrance of the Black Dragon Park Center.

He’s cross-legged on the welcome desk, his back to them. A bright yellow trench coat is tossed haphazardly next to him.

It’s his voice that first draws Ezra in. After that upsetting conversation with Susie, he’s not exactly raring for further interactions with a stranger. But that voice. It sounds just like Dad.

As they get closer, Ezra recognizes the song as one that had been getting a lot of radio airplay before—

( the world ended )

—everything started to fall apart. A song his father couldn’t have known.

The singer, sensing their approach, builds to a crescendo.

“A. Right. Chus. Mannnn!”

He lifts and spins himself around with impressive fluidity. Ezra’s stomach lurches. He’s the spitting image of his father.

“Well, heya, cats and kittens, you’re listening to WTAF. Any requests?”

Susie looks to Ezra, but Ezra’s too busy gaping to respond. She does her best to sound tough.

“We don’t want any trouble,” she says.

“Then none ye shall have.” The man holds up his hands, showing they’re empty. Then gives a big, silly grin. “Until you do. Because, y’know. ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy’ something, something.”

Ezra gives a sudden, private gasp. What the hell was he thinking: this strange man doesn’t actually look a thing like his dad.

For a few seconds there, it had been uncanny, but the longer he stares, the more inaccurate that comparison becomes.

There’s only… a similar vibe. A manic glitter in the eyes.

An insouciant lilt in the voice. If anything, this man looks more like the two vagrants from the gas station, with his beard, his long hair.

He’s nowhere near as shabby, and his clothes aren’t ragged, but there’s definitely something road-worn about him.

Susie, meanwhile, is still trying to handle the situation, unaware of Ezra’s little epiphany.

“My name’s Susie. This is Ezra.”

The strange man snorts. “Ezra. Sure.”

“What’s your name?” she asks.

He shrugs.