Page 22 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

IN A PIG’S EYE

Joe R. Lansdale

The night air smelled of excited hog. But the sounds were human.

Ricky knew they were in the trees below him.

The pines and sweet gums ran along the bottom of the hill for miles and there were pines and oaks on the top of the hill, which was where he was.

He threaded between the trees, watching his step, thinking maybe that Boy Scout merit badge he earned so many years back in Wilderness Survival might now be taken from him.

He had lost a lot of his stealth since then, but compared to those below who were trying to be quiet, he was Chingachgook.

And as for taking his merit badge from him, who was left to do it and who was left to care?

The hunters below were stepping on sticks and dried pine needles and sweet gum leaves, crackly and stiff as un-milked cornflakes. They might as well be beating drums and farting the national anthem.

But they were dangerous, none the less. They were hunters, and there were quite a few of them, and they were desperate.

The bad stuff, the cough and snort and the world gone wild, started some time back when Ricky was at work in the video store, slipping movies out of their boxes and putting the boxes behind the counter so they could be checked out.

If left in the boxes, there was always some light-fingered Louie ready to pluck and stash and quickly dash.

This way, they looked at a video cover, thought the movie looked interesting, and they wanted to rent it, they had to come to the desk and ask for it. The movie was in one of the rows of racks under the desk, which was a large round counter in the middle of the store.

Ricky was thinking what he had wanted to do was make movies, not rent them, not own a store, but it was as close to showbiz as he had gotten so far, and at thirty-two, it was beginning to look as if he had made a career choice when he wasn’t thinking about it.

It was like he had licked one of those psychedelic toads for a druggie experience, and all he had gotten was frog pee in his mouth.

It was 11:00 p.m., and one more hour and he was out.

He had worked the entire shift, from 2:00 p.m. on, and he was thinking he had to hire some help.

That schedule, seven days a week, was killing him.

Thing was, though, those were the hours folks rented movies.

During the two-to-five-p.m. shift, not so much, but enough, and after people got off work it was furious and went on hot until midnight. Weekends, all hours were busy enough.

Except tonight. Just one family in the store. It was probably due to the intense flu that was going around. Everyone was home filling garbage cans and commodes with snot-coated Kleenex.

Him, he hadn’t so much as had a sore throat or a muscle ache.

As for rentals tonight, he had been doing better on the bags of popcorn he sold, hot-popped right in the store. It was a great smell at first, but now, after months of it, the stink made him woozy. He was at the point where he would have preferred the odor of a dead body.

Worse, there were predictions that the VHS tape was on its way out. But what the hell could replace that kind of technology, some little spinning disc of some sort?

Doubtful.

The couple in the back had a kid, a boy, about eight, with them, and they spent most of their time trying to keep him from climbing on video racks. Finally, they came to the desk with Starman .

The man, a fellow who looked as if parenthood or most anything else didn’t agree with him, put the video cover on the counter. His eyes were red and he had the sniffles. He kept sucking up the contents of his nose like a four-year-old.

The mother, who made Ricky think of a former hot cheerleader who had run out of hair dye and lost the spring in her step, said, “Is this appropriate for children?”

Ricky glanced at the kid. A boy with longish blond hair in a bowl cut. He had a string of snot running out of his nose and older runs had dried on his cheeks, giving him a glazed-doughnut sheen.

“That depends,” Ricky said. “I say yes, but you might say no.”

“That’s not much of an endorsement,” said the father.

“Not a negative, either,” Ricky said. “I can’t say what will bother someone or won’t. I rent out videos. I’m not in the endorsement business.”

“Fair enough,” the father said. “This will do.”

He paid for the video and some popcorn. Ricky located the tape and slipped it inside the case. “Enjoy your movie.”

“Rock and roll,” the father said, though Ricky wasn’t sure how that applied to anything.

The family went out coughing. Ricky was certain they had grown sicker within the thirty minutes they had been in the store. Through the store glass, Ricky saw the father lean against the hood of his Chevy and toss dark vomit on the left front tire.

The mother started around toward him, but he held up his hand in an I’m okay gesture.

He didn’t look okay to Ricky. He looked worse in the overhead lights that shone in the parking lot than he had in the store.

He did not have the “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu. ” He had something less festive.

Ricky went to the bathroom and carefully washed his hands. He had handled the money the guy gave him. Money was nasty enough, but with that guy being sickly, he wanted to make sure his hands were clean.

When he came out of the restroom, his heart sank a little. Shelly the Shit was walking into the store.

“Hey, man, how’s you?” Shelly the Shit said.

“Okay,” Ricky said, flicking the panel door back and stepping inside the ringed counter.

Shelly the Shit came every night to hang out. Never rented movies, just hung out. He liked to come in earlier than tonight, and Ricky thought maybe he had missed out on his visit, but such a delightful hope had fizzled out.

Well, he had less than an hour to deal with Shelly.

So that was something positive. They called him Shelly the Shit in high school because he was willing to do most anything to anybody for little to no purpose.

He had, for reasons unknown, latched onto Ricky in recent years, coming into the store to hang out under the illusion that, because they knew one another, they were friends.

Still, Ricky kept an eye on him. Shelly the Shit wasn’t really anyone’s friend. He didn’t even like himself.

“Man, I got a Betamax,” Shelly the Shit said. “You had some Betamax tapes, I would rent them.”

“Like I been telling you,” Ricky said, “every time you bring that up. They don’t make them anymore. They lost out to VHS.”

“Everyone said Beta machines would be better, and I bought one.”

“Well, you fucked up. Lots of people did. There’s not going to be a Betamax renaissance, Shelly. How many years you had that thing? See any movement toward Beta?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking people get a real comparison, they’ll go Beta.”

“They got a real comparison. They went VHS.”

“Yeah. I guess. Hey, you been keeping up on current events?”

“What’d you mean?”

“There’s been rioting on the far side of town,” Shelly the Shit said. “Some serious business, amigo.”

“Why would that be? You sure?”

“I’m sure. There’s them getting so sick that people say there could be an epidemic. People are so scared they’re tearing stuff up and stealing. Epidemic? Shit. I don’t believe it. I mean, I feel fine. You?”

“Yeah. I’m all right.”

It was as if on cue, Shelly the Shit cleared his throat. “That’s nothing,” Shelly said. “A tickle.”

At home, Ricky warmed up some soup and had a bit of that with crackers while he watched the news. He switched around channels. This time of night, ought to have been movies and late shows about this and that, info-commercials, but the news was all that was on.

There was a panicked feel to all of it. A lot of people were sick, and rumor was an epidemic was about to be declared. The newsrooms all made a point of mentioning that most of their staff was out. One newscaster, a young blond lady, had a red sheen to her nose and her eyes looked watery.

The red-nosed lady showed a clip of army trucks moving into the East Texas town of Nacogdoches, not far from Mud Creek, where Ricky lived, and that gave him a feeling of unsteadiness. Martial law was being declared, or at least that was what was being said, but solid confirmation was yet to happen.

Ricky’d had enough. He turned off the TV. Maybe tomorrow things would be sorted, and it would turn out to be a series of isolated incidents.

While brushing his teeth, he checked to see if his tongue was coated with sickness. Nada. Eyes looked clear. No muscle aches, coughs, or leaky nose. He was fine. Just fine.

He went to his second-floor-apartment window and looked out at the street. Empty as an orphan’s stocking on Christmas morning.

Well, it was late and Mud Creek was small, but it was an odd sort of emptiness. It was almost as if that emptiness had weight.

It was the kind of emptiness one could imagine if lost in a night sea without a boat, only one’s legs and arms to paddle. Full dark around you, rolling seas and something underwater brushing against your feet.

A feeling of falling from an airplane during a storm without a parachute. All your life and accomplishments of no more importance than shit flushed down a toilet.

Slight variations on a theme. But in the end, all the same. Life didn’t give awards or medals in the end. It was just the end.

Ricky pulled his curtains and went to bed.

In the late morning there came the sound of metal impacting metal, a clatter of what might have been an escaping hubcap rolling down the street.

Ricky, dressed only in his underwear, got up and went to the window, looked out at the street. Lights, a gathering of people around a mashed-up Buick stuck into a mashed-up Chevy. There were cop car lights.

Ricky pulled on some clothes and his shoes and went out to join the lookie-loo crowd. People, mostly in nightclothes, were gathered around the wreck.