Page 2 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

He stopped at a bookstore and bought The Bridges of Madison County. He picked up some more of that cake that she fed him, and he left the box open so the cake would dry out.

Life was good. He read two pages and he had to unzip. He imagined the call on the radio.

Domestic disturbance.

He imagined himself speeding legally, breaking down her door and killing her husband. Right in front of her. He imagined her worse than she’d been today, bloody and beaten.

He came harder than he had in years, but after he was done, when he went for tissues, he avoided his eyes in the mirror. There was something wrong about what just happened. The way he wanted her like that, bloody and beaten, hateful.

The next two days were empty.

No call from nosy neighbor Rona. Too much chaos at work with everyone keyed up about the superflu in a way that wasn’t fun, not anymore.

The calls came in, but they were never from Rona, which meant that Mrs. Blanchard was either safe or dead.

How those things became one and the same.

Safe. Dead. And the nights were no good, either.

His pecker was getting nasty, vile. Sometimes Mrs. Blanchard was tied up, and not in the fun way.

Sometimes she was full of bullet holes and Abel was kissing those holes, sucking the blood out of them, sticking his pecker in those holes.

It didn’t feel good, knowing there might be an afterlife, knowing his father might be up there eating popcorn, shaking his head at his sick, perv son.

On the third day, Abel bought two boxes of tissues at the market. The broad at the register sighed. “I should stock up,” she said. “That superbug, it’s something isn’t it?”

Abel took the long way home. He drove by the body shop, where he saw Kip Blanchard in real life.

A monster. Filthy as he seemed in the framed wedding portrait hanging in their foyer, the photograph that Abel had tried to avoid noticing.

Smoking and laughing and holding court for the other guys.

Mean guys. True grime. Hair growing out of Kip’s white T-shirt, grease on his shirt, on his hands.

Kip held a cigarette between his lips and mimed taking a woman from behind.

Foul. Abel thought of the devil, the white bandanna on Kip’s head like a satanic mark, a signal.

Abel didn’t do a drive-by at Mrs. Blanchard’s.

The street was too small. He tried to be a good boy.

He tried one story in his head where Mrs. Blanchard was in her peach dress and the husband was dead on the floor.

Bloodied. Stabbed fifty times, maybe sixty.

His pecker didn’t like that, so back he went to the other way. His juices squirting all over her bloodied corpse, bringing her back to life, his pecker in there doing CPR on her heart.

On the fifth day, Rona called.

Mrs. Blanchard opened the door. Jeans and a sad ratty T-shirt. Probably his. Abel wasn’t one of those guys who liked it when women dressed like men. And he was heartened to feel his muscles tense up when he spotted the blood on her forehead.

Abel was not a monster. His pecker didn’t like that blood, either.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, and Mrs. Blanchard crumpled like a tissue.

Abel entered the house. The baby was out of sight.

“Before you start… Don’t. I can’t do it, okay? I can’t leave him and it’s not his fault. My mother… If I leave him, who’s gonna pay for her assisted living? And Randy, you know?”

Abel knew enough to say nothing. To nod.

“Oh fuck,” she said, and she fell into him, through him. Nothing ever felt better than her tears and her trembling shoulders. She was honest now. She said she was a fuckup. She said she always chose the wrong men.

“Not possible,” Abel said. “There’s no such thing as the right man. They’re all evil.”

The pads of her little fingers went this way and that way. “You’re sweet,” she said. “It’s like you’re not… I’m sorry.”

And nothing had ever felt worse than her regaining her equilibrium, patting his backside, pulling away to pour coffee. She lit a cigarette. She sat in the chair and kicked her feet up on the table. Abel didn’t feel like a man, not anymore. He was a cop again. Nothing more.

“So,” she said. “Is this what you do all day? You go from one shit marriage to another?”

“Sometimes. But I’m not one to judge.”

She huffed. She was nothing like the Mrs. Blanchard in his fantasies. “Right,” she said. “Sure.”

“Would you like to press charges?”

“Yes,” she said. “You know that cake I made for Rona? She brought it back, left in on our porch, and the raccoons got into it, which pissed off Kip. So, I go to Rona and ask her to please not do that kind of thing and she says she hates devil’s food cake.

She likes angel food cake. I mean, who in their right mind would take angel food over devil’s food? ”

Abel would do that. He preferred angel food. “I hear you.”

“I mean, hello… We’re talking about chocolate.”

He wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t cackle for her stupid stand-up act or spar with her and admit that he was like Rona in more ways than one, that he, too, found devil’s food to be excessively rich, heavy. He was here to protect, to serve.

“Would you like to press charges against your husband?”

She blew smoke at him. “Would you?”

“You’d be surprised at how many systems are in place to help women in this situation.”

“Right,” she said. “Well, in the meantime I have to go help my sister. She’s sick.”

“Can you and Randy stay with her for a while?”

She looked at him like he shouldn’t know her baby’s name. “Wow.”

“I’m good with names.”

“I’m terrible,” she said, and she was back. Lovely and scared and soft. “But I guess that’s no surprise… Do you want to know something sick?”

Her feet were on the ground now. He was quiet. Ghost-in-the-graveyard-level still.

“When he came after me today, after the whole cake fiasco, I ran into the bedroom. I wanted Rona to hear, so I made a dig about his dead brother. I wanted him to belt me because then you’d come back and…

I’m repulsive. I’m a mother and I’m poking the bear trying to get myself killed so this cop I met once will come back and ‘rescue’ me. ”

Abel’s insides were melting and hard. “Maybe he will,” he said.

She lit another cigarette. “Right. And then we’ll run away and live happily ever after and make a big happy family. Nope. I’m a fuckup, Officer. I’m a real true fuckity-fucking fuckup.”

“You’re an angel, Amelie.”

Abel did it. He said her name. She was quiet now. Too quiet. Did he overstep? Did she realize that he’d done a little recon at the station? She gulped a little, and maybe this was good. Maybe she wanted him to say it again. A-muh-lee. But then she chuckled.

“Oh, I’m not an ‘angel,’ Officer. That’s your department.”

Abel’s warm insides turned cold. He didn’t know the first thing about women, and he scratched the back of his head like he hadn’t been murmuring her name in the shower, practicing.

“Oh, I’m no angel, either, Mrs. B. Far from it, in fact.”

It was terrible, the way she laughed, like she saw right through him and his Mrs. B nonsense. What if she loved the devil too much to love him?

“So,” she said. “What about you? Girlfriend? Crazy ex? Or maybe you’re the crazy ex…”

“No,” he said. “Not at the moment.”

He always added that second part to sound like a more complete person.

“Mmm,” she said. “The night me and Kip met, I’m sitting at this bar and I’m six thousand sheets to the wind…”

He didn’t like this, any of it, and he chuckled. “I’ve been there.”

It was a lie, and she knew it. “Anyway,” she said.

“Kip swaggers up like, ‘Where’s your boyfriend?’ I’m feeling myself, so I go off on him, right?

I tell him I hate when guys ask if you have a boyfriend.

As if I need an excuse in the form of a man.

If I don’t like a guy, I don’t like him.

I shouldn’t have to invent a boyfriend .

Sometimes I think if I wasn’t so drunk, so flippant…

I don’t know where I was going with this, but it’s that thing where someone meets you and that first impression sticks.

I can’t blame Kip for thinking that drunk me was the true me. And maybe it is, you know?”

Abel didn’t like her talking about her husband as if he wasn’t a man, too, and the way she covered her mouth to emit a tiny burp, the way she shifted, she knew she was making him uncomfortable. He could feel her trying to change. He could see it.

This was love. It had to be.

“Anyway,” she said. “What’s your story? Seriously.”

He didn’t know how to tell her there was no one else, so he borrowed from Bridges and said he wasn’t so lucky, that he’d only been in love once, that it wasn’t in the cards.

It was terrifying, waiting for her to respond, the way she was looking at him like she couldn’t decide what to do with him, like he was a sundress she might just return for a refund.

He was failing. She wanted to know him, but he couldn’t tell her about his pecker, about the way his heart raced every time he thought she might be bleeding, wounded.

He couldn’t tell her about the boxes of Kleenex he’d torn through in her honor, the way he’d entered her in his mind, imagined his pecker soaked in her blood.

“You’re sweet,” she said. “I guess there has to be one good one in the world…”

She laughed and he laughed, and this was The Bridges of Madison County.

It had to be. And then she looked down at her dirty fingers in this way where he felt invited to join her.

So he did, and they sat there like that for a minute or two, both of them staring at her hands.

“Well,” she said. “I hope I never see you again…”