Page 29 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

LENORA

Jonathan Janz

Baker Ludlow was watching Creepshow when the preacher started wailing on his front lawn.

He wasn’t really watching the movie, just letting the VCR grind as he dozed in his La-Z-Boy.

And the preacher wasn’t actually in the yard, more like the crumbly edge of the driveway.

But there was no question Pastor Wiggins was in dire straits.

His voice was strident enough to rouse Baker from a bourbon-assisted stupor.

He retrieved his twelve-gauge and stepped onto the porch, where the sun glare was so intense he had to squint down the hill to see the preacher.

“Oh, thank God!” Wiggins cried, hands on knees.

What got Baker’s attention wasn’t the preacher’s chalk-white hair, which was no longer teased into its accustomed pompadour but sprouted instead like the alabaster fronds of some blighted palm tree; nor was it the way the preacher’s nipples peeked through his sweat-soaked polo shirt like the eyes of some grotesque beluga whale.

Baker scarcely registered the little red wagon the preacher towed.

What got Baker’s attention was the swelling beneath the preacher’s jaw.

He’d heard it labeled all sorts of things: tube neck, superflu, choking sickness, Captain Trips. They could call it whatever they liked, but it all amounted to the same thing.

The end.

Seeing it in person was a far sight worse than hearing it described on TV.

Living out here in the boonies, his only neighbor Sookie, owner of that shit show of an exotic animal farm a couple miles over, Baker relied on the evening news for information, and in the beginning, coverage of the disaster had been restrained:

At first: “Rumors of a New Virus.”

Soon after: “Mysterious Illness Cause for Concern?”

Then: “Authorities Ease Flu Hysteria.”

About the time the sniffling news anchor had announced, “The CDC is warning citizens to take precautions,” pandemonium had been unleashed on the country.

Baker stomached as much as he could, but when a band of radicals hijacked a TV station and commenced with public executions, he tapped out, preferring his modest library of movies to the real-time doom of humankind.

Yet when he journeyed to town for groceries, he’d been forced to confront the reality.

Dead bodies everywhere. Purplish half circles under their eyes and twin contrails of mucus oozing from their nostrils.

A utility worker starfished along the roadside with a throat so black and swollen you felt you could float down the river on it with a cooler of beer and some George Strait on the boom box.

Baker shivered and regarded the preacher.

“I only need a moment,” Wiggins told him.

Baker raised the twelve-gauge.

“Please,” Wiggins said. “I don’t think it’s airborne.”

Baker nodded. “Take another step and your guts’ll be airborne.”

The preacher jackknifed in a coughing fit and produced a lime-green glob that resembled Jell-O left to sit too long at a church potluck.

Baker watched impassively. His front yard was a good half-acre, and not only was Wiggins downhill but downwind as well.

Nevertheless, if this shit was as contagious as advertised, the next state over was still too close.

He motioned with the barrel. “Get on back to your flock, Reverend.”

Wiggins dragged a wrist over his mouth. “I need your help, Baker.”

“There’s nothing I can do for you.”

“Not me,” Wiggins answered. “It’s for her.” The preacher moved aside and Baker beheld what was in the little red wagon.

“Why’re you hauling a baby deer?” he asked.

“She’s a dik-dik.”

Baker scowled at him. “What the fuck’s a dik-dik?”

“Mini-antelope from Sookie’s farm,” Wiggins explained. “I’ve been going property to property, checking on folks.”

“Spreading the plague, you mean. Jesus Christ, Wiggins, don’t you have any sense?”

“You don’t—” Wiggins barked out another croupy cough, and when he wiped his mouth, there were scarlet streaks in the saliva. The preacher inspected this gruel a moment before smearing it on his trousers. “Everyone’s dying, Baker. Everyone. The fact that you’re alive means you might be immune.”

Baker said nothing.

Wiggins gestured feebly. “You wouldn’t believe what I saw at the pet farm. Some of the creatures had perished from the flu. Others had been”—his face pinched—“strung up. There were zebras, a tiger. They were flayed open like deer some hunter had bagged. Sookie’s dead, too.”

“Flu doesn’t spare you because you’ve got a hundred acres and a Porsche.”

“It wasn’t the sickness. Someone had…” Wiggins licked his lips. “Someone had impaled Sookie. Same with his wife and young son.”

Baker’s grip on the twelve-gauge tightened. “Any sign of Dead Ed?”

“Just his handiwork.”

Fucking ghoul , Baker thought. “Dead Ed” Dedaker’s rap sheet was so long the justice system had ceased trying to rehabilitate him.

Whenever someone went missing, folks suspected Dedaker, and Baker suspected they were right.

Some claimed he only worked at the pet farm so he could abuse the animals.

Baker suspected they were right about that, too.

“These were atrocities ,” Wiggins said. He indicated the dik-dik. “This poor animal… she was the only one left. I found her hiding under a squirrel cage. She’s dehydrated… on the verge of starvation. If you could—”

“Get your ass off my property,” Baker said.

Wiggins blinked at him. “But—”

Baker racked the shotgun.

“ Please ,” Wiggins moaned, and to Baker’s horror the preacher actually sank to his knees and raised his arms in supplication. “I can’t care for the animal. I’m dying.”

“No shit.”

“You’ve endured tragedy, Brother Baker. I know how you’ve suffered.”

“Shut your piehole,” Baker replied. “And if you call me ‘Brother’ again, I’ll expedite the dying thing for you.”

“That would be a mercy,” Wiggins said. “I can’t tell you how much it—” But he was off on another coughing jag, this one so severe it ended with him thrashing in the grass and clawing at his throat.

Baker glanced at the dik-dik, who was so captivated by a white moth flittering through the wildflowers that she didn’t notice Wiggins choking to death on his own snot.

The preacher gasped, wheezed, and flumped onto his back. His face had gone a bruisy mauve color. His eyes rolled sightlessly up to the midday sun. Dead.

“Gross,” Baker muttered. He lowered the twelve-gauge.

The dik-dik studied him from the wagon.

“And you can fuck right off,” Baker said, and went inside.

A short time later, Baker was besieged by a whanging headache. He schlepped into the kitchen to swallow some painkillers, but paused at the sink, the glass to his mouth, his gaze fixed on something in the backyard. His upper lip rose in a snarl. “You little…”

He burst out the back door and stalked toward the dik-dik, who was nosing through the charred remains of the old house. “The hell’s wrong with you? I told you to scat.”

The dik-dik recoiled, but didn’t flee. Around them, cicadas churred as though enjoying the show.

“ Move! ” he bellowed. “If you want food, it’s not here.” He indicated the woods. “See? All the roughage you need.”

The dik-dik peered up at him, commas of milky foam in the corners of her mouth.

He settled his hands on his hips. “If you’re thirsty, there’s a stream just over the ridge.”

The dik-dik lowered her muzzle and nudged the neck of a Jim Beam bottle. She was a tad over a foot tall, a tuft of snowy hair tacking on a couple inches. He put her at maybe ten pounds.

“Get out of here!” he shouted. Jesus, his head throbbed. It was ninety-five degrees, the humidity so thick it was like breathing chicken broth.

The dik-dik started toward him. Baker flung out his hands. “Don’t you dare.”

She stopped, her large brown eyes profound.

“Think that’ll work on me?” He grunted. “Lemme tell you what I saw on my way to town. Half a dozen dogs along Highway 24, all of them goners. That shithole where my wife used to take riding lessons? You guessed it: every horse in the paddock.”

The dik-dik watched him.

“You’re toast, little lady. Everyone is.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but he didn’t care to dwell on the exceptions.

On his tour of the residential district, he’d heard more than one person weeping.

From a navy-blue saltbox house near the bank had drifted anguished wails and what might have been a child’s cry for help.

The worst by far was the banana-yellow Dodge pickup truck burring down Main Street, its unmuffled engine boisterous enough to draw Baker from the crypt-like general store.

He’d stumbled onto the sidewalk as the pickup whipped past, and he counted it a mercy its occupants hadn’t spotted him.

Because chained to the back bumper was Sheriff George Cromwell.

Perhaps the sheriff had galloped behind the truck for a spell.

If so, his galloping days were over. The front of his body had been chewed away by the asphalt, his legs stringy horrors, like cherry-red seaweed.

The sheriff left a glistening blood trail as the Dodge thundered up Main Street, and though Baker hoped it was his imagination, he could’ve sworn he’d heard Cromwell begging the driver to stop.

The driver had been Dead Ed, the passenger his brother, Frankie.

The truck wasn’t theirs, but trifling matters like legal ownership had never fazed the Dedakers, and the end of the world had done nothing to reform their habits.

Baker heard the fiends cackling as the Dodge swerved onto Poplar Street, and in the four nights since, he’d heard the same cackling as he lay unsleeping in his bed.

Baker didn’t notice the dik-dik advancing until it was right under him.

“ Jesus ,” he gasped. He wheeled around to flee, but his legs got tangled and he performed a graceless header in the grass. He threw a frenzied glance at the animal, who kept on coming, then he blundered to his feet and beat the hastiest retreat he could manage.