Page 26 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

“Dad read a lot of Hardy Boys as a kid,” she said. “He had that room built into the tower in the fifties. He showed it to me as a kid. When he died, I never thought about it much. I just took over his job.”

She hid in there, came out at night and slipped from behind the clock tower, crept down to the creek, where she washed her face and drank water, not worried about germs because she had no choice but to drink.

She would then creep into the woods to take care of bathroom matters.

She spent time among the trees looking at the moon.

Then, well before morning, she would sneak back to the tower.

“I should have shit in a can, but can you imagine the smell in that little room? And I should have stayed in there all the time, but I didn’t.

Foolishly, I felt I needed to know what was going on.

At night, I would sometimes climb up in the tower and grease the clock and look out the little windows or the clock face at the town.

“It was coming apart out there. People killing one another. People like you and I, immune, gathering together and deciding anyone not immune had to go.”

She explained how they had cookouts in the middle of the street.

It got so even those immune to the disease fell to hunger after the stores had been looted of food.

The survivors began to form gangs. Gene was head of one of them.

When they ran out of dogs and cats, rats and mice, they killed one another for a food source. They had barbecues down there.

“The smell of meat cooking. It made me hungry. I’m ashamed, but it made me hungry.”

The population fought and dwindled. In time, there were only a few visible out there in the street.

Jett did all right until the voluminous food supply in the secret room became less so. Rats had been in the crackers. The canned goods went faster than she expected.

“I thought someone would come, you know? A government agency. But they never did. I got very hungry pretty quick. I slipped out at night and started looking around the town for food, but the place was well plundered. I found a little something now and then. Hunger is what got me in trouble.”

She explained how she had been spotted one night by a roving band led by Gene, who had finally found his spot in the world; ruling over a group of people dumber than he was, but equally cruel.

They wanted her, and not just to rape, but to eat. They caught her and told her how it would work, the way she would first service them, and then would serve as a delectable meal after they fattened her up with whatever they had.

They took her to a room in the courthouse. The place was filled with trash, and the group lived there and ruled over themselves, because the inhabitants of the town, due primarily to the disease, murder, and the cannibalism, were down to just them and her.

The room they put her in was warm and without circulating air.

It had one chair and nothing else. They brought a mattress in, and she knew that wasn’t for her comfort.

It would have a onetime long-extended use, and then dinner, with her as the main course.

They joked about it. They discussed who got what piece when she was well cooked and the meat ready to drop off the bone. Greg wanted a thigh.

But they messed up. They left her alone for a few minutes. She looked out the window. The room was three stories high, as any building went in Mud Creek, except for the clock tower, which would have measured about four stories.

She could see the street and what one of them had called the barbecue station.

It was a big smoker barrel and the fire inside of it had already been started, working its way down to coals.

The black smoke chugged out of the smoker pipe.

She thought maybe she could break out of the window and jump.

They might not have their mattress fun, just dinner if she did that.

Jett had a penny. She discovered it while idly sticking her hand in her pocket. A nervous gesture.

“I remembered that old rhyme about find a penny, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck.”

Jett used the chair to stand on and used the penny as a kind of screwdriver to unscrew an air vent. She pulled herself into it.

It was dead dark in there, but she kept crawling, and after a while, the air vent warped beneath her, then gave way. She crashed through the ceiling and landed on the floor of a large empty room that had once been the DMV.

Chairs, tables, for some reason, they were all gone. She got up as soon as her stunned body let her.

“I limped out of there, and I hadn’t gone far when one of Gene’s men saw me.

They came after me. I got down to the creek and ran along that, my leg having lost its limp by then.

I managed across the little creek, up a hill, and through some trees.

A trail led down to the Sabine, and I found the boat there.

The outboard had gas. I got it cranked, and away I went.

I had driven a boat a few times, but I was hardly an expert.

“I saw the men, Gene included, onshore. He fired his pistol at me.

Fortunately, I was moving fast. I went down the river, found a little cover of sorts, lots of willows hanging off the riverbank.

I motored up there among the trees, tied off the boat to a cypress root, and slept on the boat bottom. I had to. I was about to fall over.

“I began to think I had it made. I decided I would try and find a place along the river where I might find food. An abandoned cabin. Anything.

“I was out on the water next morning, and I hadn’t gone along far when I heard the growl of a motor, and there was the boat you saw.

Gene on the deck. They had found their own ride, and they were trying to find me, or hoping to.

I couldn’t believe that idiot Gene, who couldn’t find his ass with both hands, was within an ass hair of having me again.

“I knew he would catch up with me, so I ran the boat aground and made a run for it. From there, you know the rest.”

“I think Gene hasn’t given up,” Ricky said.

“I know him well enough to know how petty he can be. Now with power, he’s got nothing else to do.

As for his few followers, he has to keep them busy so they don’t have time to figure out how truly stupid he is.

They’re just looking for a daddy to tell them what to do. So, they’ll be back.”

But they weren’t right back. Things went fine for a while, and it started to look like they might be okay, surviving in the woods, eating squirrels, and in season nuts and papaws, muscadines, digging certain roots to be cleaned and boiled.

Being a Boy Scout gave Ricky a leg up on that, as he had taken his scout learning seriously.

He was rusty, but it was all coming back to him.

He had his scout book as a backup. If necessary, he could also fold a flag, but that seemed like an unnecessary skill now and forever.

Ricky hadn’t started out to seduce Jett, nor she him, but it happened. And it was a good thing, up there in the deer stand, a cool night wind blowing through the open windows, their sleeping bags zipped together, finding the moment and the after moments, happy as children discovering Easter eggs.

Contemplating on it afterward, Jett sleeping beside him, his arm thrown over her, he knew it couldn’t last. But where was there to go?

What was there to do? A town could be worse.

If Gene and his crew came looking for them, they would find them reasonably quick.

The deer stand was somewhat hidden, but Ricky had found it easily enough, and so would they over time.

What to do was more than a mild conundrum.

Over the following days, Ricky showed Jett where they could find edible wild plants.

The basics. He showed her trails he knew, the spring where he got his water.

It was clean and clear and the water wouldn’t need boiling.

He showed her, too, that in the cool of the evening, it was a good idea to be in the deer stand to avoid the hogs.

The beasts ran in packs, and sometimes the Big Boy, as he had now decided to call the hog that had killed Greg’s accomplice, roamed free of hoggish alliance.

In short time, the hogs, already a menace, would grow fast and become even more comfortable with taking over not only the woods, but entire towns.

Ricky showed Jett certain trees that could be climbed quicky, and suggested they try and stay within a short run of them. He knew that wasn’t an absolute, always being near those trees, but it was a wishful comfort.

They found and piled small rocks near the climbing trees so ammunition for his slingshot would be available.

And then on an afternoon when he was building a fish trap with rocks at the edge of the river, designed so fish could swim in easily, but not quite in the opposite direction, he heard a boat motor grinding over the water.

Jett had left her clothes at the edge of the river and was bathing in the water, trying to rinse off some of the worst of the day’s survival dirt. When she heard the sound of the motor, she came out of the water and began to hastily dress in what were now little more than rags.

So as not to leave footprints that led directly to the deer stand, they ran across the small patch of shore and into the woods.

Then they made their way toward the stand by a roundabout method, walking on piles of pine needles and rotten leaves.

A good tracker could still follow them, but Ricky doubted Gene could have tracked his own feet.

When it came to the former police chief, smart was a distant cousin twice removed.

Ricky and Jett came to the deer stand, stood at the bottom of the ladder, reluctant to climb up and put themselves into what would serve as an inescapable trap. Even below the stand, the view of the beach was good, so they squatted low, observed, and listened.