Page 138 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

WALK ON GILDED SPLINTERS

David J. Schow

SOOTH

Barker was already awake. He could do that weird dog thing, sleeping with his eyes partially open, white sclera the buffer for an alertness never totally relaxed. He snapped into the here and now with that amazing sniffer of his already testing the air for threat.

Trick Baby stirred the embers of the scat fire and shared out what was left of the jerky. If lucky, she might arrow a bunny today. If not, she and the dog would have to go grubbing or worse, eating those crunchy, bitter insects so awful they had no names beyond flix, chudders, or shitbugs.

She could almost remember a time when waking up could be a luxury—the time squandered floating to the surface of wakefulness itself an indulgence—as opposed to opening your eyes in mid-rape.

She’d bartered sex for food or shelter before, like everyone, and fought her way through or past other encounters that were unavoidable. It was always rape either way.

No clocks. No matter what time it was supposed to be by antique measures, the sky vacillated in its spectrum from mud to zinc and back again, monotonously.

The sun stayed low, near the horizon, usually hiding.

Clouds massed and there was hail and lightning and sometimes roils of virulent color like flames that hold still.

Almost beautiful, were they not the harbingers of acid sleet that stung the skin and could blind.

You had to call them clouds because nothing else fit; never white, never billowy, not known to “scud.” Shelter was never unimportant, but Trick Baby had learned the huddle-cuddle for when there were zero options and no escape time.

She balled up with Barker, his nose right under her chin, and suffered the damage to any exposed flesh, to spare the dog.

Her fried skin usually healed, given time.

But lose your sight and you were gone, gone.

Raped a thousand more times and then eaten, picked clean alongside the bones of your dog.

Even if she possessed a compass, it would not work among the strange energies.

She knew she had to go over the mountains of the moon and down the valley of the shadow.

Children had to learn to walk through fire, fly through smoke.

Her purpose pointed her; she had a tale to tell. Nothing else mattered, or occurred.

Trick Baby was an excellent archer. She was this-many years old.

Barker cautioned her against most hairy situations.

A day without rape was a good day; a day without puking your guts out from gnarly food was an excellent day.

Pregnancy was rarely a hindrance. As Trick Baby had seen, most of those girls died or gave birth to things with too many teeth and not enough eyes, things that dribbled out in pieces or never learned to breathe.

So, what was her purpose?

Long ago, her mother had told her about the Monk.

Not her actual mother, but her Other-Mother.

The woman who had birthed Trick Baby (allegedly) had briefly enjoyed the miracle of her child’s wholeness; after that she hadn’t been so lucky.

Other-Mother was the one with the story, which she had learned from an Another Mother who preceded her.

The story had to find its way to Lewis the Monk, and for telling the tale, Trick Baby might be anointed as a sooth.

Then maybe the Monk would tell her what came next.

He was called Lewis the Monk because there were other monks, false ones. Holier-than-thou monks that could keep you from reaching the next thing you had to do if you didn’t die. Other-Mother had been mildly curious about “after.” Nobody lived long, leaving scant time for daydreaming.

Trick Baby was much more interested in “after.”

If she made it that far. If not, there was no one, no further link in the chain that went back a very long time.

She needed every resource she could muster.

You learned how to smell things that were about to happen.

You learned the gut twinge that told you not to eat those berries.

Which mushrooms could cure your headache or make you shit blood.

Which rat pack might share food versus more rape, although most often this was the same thing.

Barker didn’t like that.

So, he slept with his eyes open. One eye on Trick Baby, one eye on the perimeter.

Barker would go for the throat, the balls, the fingers.

It was how Trick Baby had won the big khukuri blade strapped to her hip.

There was a notch near the handle shaped like the footprint of a cow, rumored to forbid the use of the blade against sacred animals, although Trick Baby had never experienced any preternormal consequences worth noting.

She sharpened it every day on whatever shards of concrete she encountered.

She also carved and fletched her own arrows. Bamboo was rare, but she preferred it.

Her first bow had been won from an assailant. Her next, she constructed herself after examining the remains of the first.

Kill, eat, hole up, walk on. She had heard warnings and myths and even minor legends.

She understood fable on a cellular level, but was incapable of forming a parable.

A story, though, could be repeated. The story ran that the Monk might give her a new purpose once she had honored her present one. It tempted, it beckoned.

If true, that would be bumpity—another collision of syllables Trick Baby could barely fathom, but she knew that it meant good.

PUMPS

Lewis the Monk was vexed by a word, and the word was pumps .

He remembered the way his stylus had hovered in his hand over the sheet of treated leather.

So much of his internal spirit level relied on his ability to define and interpret, the fundaments of his calling as a sage.

It had taken a huge chunk of chronostratigraphy to logic out what paper might have been.

The plagues were a given. The Kingdom had not been decimated by an angry supernatural spirit so much as the overcrush of its own populace—too many grounders squabbling over limited space and food.

Wars had been engaged long ago and the herd had been thinned.

The Changed Air encouraged new plagues, and one of these maladies was said to have consumed all the paper on the planet.

It had all decomposed to black goo about the same time the Digital Pearl Harbor destroyed the electronic record.

Maddeningly opaque words. Lewis was still trying to figure them out.

What written graphic record existed in the Archivum Sycorax was essentially tattooed on leather sheets.

The Book of Red Men had traditionally conferred huge meaning and portent onto this word, pumps .

They needed to be deactivated via ritual or vast harm would result.

But was it imminent harm, or was the passage an allegory, meant to illustrate the eternal dichotomy—yin or yang, evil or good, dark or light, flag or boulder?

The planet was much hotter now.

Sooth was said to equal “in truth.” Hence, soothsayers related stories you hoped were true.

The Book had always been incomplete. Flawed through centuries of misdirection and erroneous data.

So much of the Monk’s compass had to reside in his gut feelings.

Too much. Every day he stared down the vast gulf of storytelling, the difference between “a version” and the version that might stand for all of subsequent history.

Was he committed to his sense of moral rightness, or victimized by his own admittedly seductive charter of absolute authority?

Did the divinity of sacred texts allow for revision? Potential sacrilege, there.

Monk Philip visited to proffer a brand-new invent.

Monk Lewis rubbed the substance between his fingertips. “What is it?”

Philip beamed his gap-toothed grin. “Mulberry bark, mixed with hemp and garment rags and worn-out fishing nets, mashed into a pulp. Then we squeezed out the water and let it dry in the sun. It works with sedge plants, too. See? You can mark it with charcoal, or soot mixed with animal fat.”

Monk Lewis’s entire universe changed in a brilliant flash of light.

“Paper,” he said.

That had happened ten years ago, and he had been collating ever since.

TRASH

In the beginning, there was the Book. Scholars and acolytes devoted decades to plumbing its mysteries and deciphering its portent.

All answers were said to be contained within the Book, including the keys to defeating the tenebris pestilentia .

Subsects were birthed; they waxed, then guttered over more years.

The Nigrum pandemic was smarter and had all the time in the world.

It waxed, then mutated, being much better at self-perpetuation than its human food.

Those who survived and reproduced in dwindling numbers were left to seek salvation in sacred texts.

Perhaps they had read it wrong, or not recognized the obvious signs, context, clues, codes.

The Book was said to be everything, the tale entire, the revealed truth.

No one had any real clue how the Book had first come to be recorded for others to ponder. It had been so many years since most teachers could actually read. More still, for extrapolation (another word Trick Baby did not know).

Yet words were the most permanent thing Trick Baby had, and her recital always started the same way:

“Uncounted were the days until Trash was born in shock-lightning and kerosene…”

She repeated it, rehearsed it, or parts of it, dozens of times per day. In whispers. Out loud. Silently, to her inmost self. The words she carried were part of her metabolism.

Necessity had required her to consider many variants of the story she heard at one time or another, if only so they could be ranked or dismissed. She had to be the expert. Corruption, pollution had to be expunged for the life lesson to remain clear. Interpretations had to be weighed and factored.