Page 3 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Something changed. It was her, Amelie. She was watching him, waiting.

It was scary to be so close. What if he was wrong?

The same old Abel, drowning in delusions.

Didn’t matter. He had to do it, he had to jump.

And thank God he went through with it because the malarkey was all true, wasn’t it?

Love was powerful. You really could say a lot without opening your mouth.

He smiled. She smiled. Abel was inside of something as real and private as this little kitchen table.

The first flush, like that tickle in your throat that hints at things to come.

Her eyes told him what she wanted. “Abel,” he said. “It’s Abel.”

There was radio silence for two days, but that’s how it goes in love stories, in sex.

In, out, in, out. People were dying. It was like JFK being assassinated all day, every day, and in crazy times, people do crazy things. They were both making their plans, probably.

Abel dug up his father’s pistol. No one knew about it. Only him.

He drove to the market for tissues, but there was a big sign out front.

NO TISSUES NO TOILET PAPER MOVE ON

At home, he mopped up with a washcloth, and he could feel it in his bones, in his eyeballs. Tomorrow was it. Tomorrow Rona would call.

But then tomorrow came and he was wrong. Stupid and sick. Sick to want the call from Rona. His pecker was achy—he needed to get nicer washcloths—and he couldn’t go on like this. Waiting. She couldn’t, either.

What if she was dead? What if she thought he didn’t love her?

He flipped it around like one of the detectives. She’d opened up to him. She told him the husband beat her. She told him she wanted out, but she couldn’t get out.

And what did Abel do?

Nothing.

It was a tragedy, really.

Kip Blanchard got himself killed.

The poor bastard was in the Safeway parking lot and the colder guys on the job were right. What kind of an idiot brings a gun to a knife fight and loses?

Kip Blanchard, apparently.

Three days after the funeral, Abel put two suitcases in the trunk of his car, one for him, one for her, for Amelie.

He stashed Kip’s handkerchief in his back pocket.

Not in a serial-killer-with-a-trophy kinda way.

More like a cat who kills the mouse for its humans.

And he wasn’t dumb. He wasn’t gonna show it to Amelie.

He also didn’t expect things would get physical right away.

It was just there to remind him of what he did, what he was.

A man.

He picked up fresh flowers and he drove slowly. There was no rush, not today. When you find the one, you want to savor every step of the beautiful ladder, each one a Bridge leading to someplace better, higher. Closer.

He popped a breath mint after he parked in front of her house.

It was quiet here, which said a lot about Amelie’s life, about her friends. A dead husband and no one’s here to help?

“Excuse me! Officer!”

It was her. Rona. And it was him. Stupid.

She froze up on her front lawn. He looked down at the bandanna in his hand. White and blood-soaked. Off. Abel was not a man, not fully. He was a boy clinging to an unlucky rabbit’s foot and Rona was backing up, looking this way and that way. A bird going cuckoo.

He slipped the handkerchief in his back pocket.

Abel needed a minute.

Rona was old. Elderly kind of old. And Amelie was right.

She was paranoid, sickly. While the house looked pert and quaint on the outside, it was a different story inside.

Sticky notes everywhere, pink and green and blue.

Tape Murder, She Wrote! Milk! Kool-Aid! It broke Abel’s heart to think of a woman living like this, shit-stained granny panties and no grandchildren.

He’d been smart about things, taming her the way you do a snake, holding her tight, telling her it was okay, leading her to the bathroom and helping her out of her clothes, running the water like a home health aide, making sure it wasn’t too hot or too cold.

Eventually Rona submitted, as if she wanted this samaritan to send her to a better place. Protect and serve. Or maybe she just passed out from the stress.

In any case, she died before he could kill her, and if the cops did investigate—they wouldn’t—they’d conclude that a shut-in died in her own tub. People don’t like that kind of thing. They don’t like it when lonely old people die alone.

Abel drank the last of Rona’s tea. It was safer this way, taking a piece of her that he couldn’t carry around in his back pocket.

The bandanna. Stupid, yes. But stupid only matters if you refuse to get smart.

He was kind, a chip off the old block, visiting Rona one last time, kneeling by her side.

He was starting to see that his father was wrong about a lot, but right, too.

Turned out Abel really was off. Anyone who kills two people and keeps his tea down is missing a piece or two.

A heart. A conscience. Abel heard a siren and remembered the virus.

Maybe the bad in him was in him all along.

His mother used to paint her eyelids blue to bring out the blue in her God-given eyes.

Maybe the virus was like the eyelid paint, drawing the truth out of Abel.

It was good to sit here, though. Proof that his goodness was also true, same as the bad.

The dead don’t die all at once. A soul goes slowly, in stages. Steeping tea.

And Abel was really doing it, wasn’t he? Getting away with two murders.

Okay, one and a half, but still. It was something.

Room 24 hadn’t changed much over the past twenty years, not that Abel told Amelie.

She looked around. She sniffed. “It’s bleach,” she said. “I hate bleach.”

“At least it’s clean,” he said, like a husband. Not yet. Soon, though.

Things hadn’t gone exactly as planned. When he rang Amelie’s bell, she slammed the door on him.

She said she was fine. She was mourning and she said Abel had no idea what that was like because he wasn’t married, he didn’t know that love and hate are in lockstep, that passion is ugly, that she didn’t want the father of her child to die, that it wasn’t even about Randy, that love was love.

It hurt, the way she didn’t invite him in, the way she said he had no business being here, as if he was in uniform, as if he wasn’t hers.

Eventually, she opened the door.

“Okay,” she’d said. “Okay.”

Abel went into the house. Again… not the stuff of dreams. Papers everywhere.

She was in those jeans, jeans and a sweater that belonged to him.

Kip. She was frustrated with liens and mortgages.

All of it was so ugly, more proof that what Abel had done was noble.

Kip had been a secretive prick, and the house was underwater. Her life was underwater.

Abel sat at the table.

“Any leads?”

“Any what?”

“Leads,” he said.

“I don’t know. I have to focus on this so I can go get my sister’s kids.”

Oh right. Abel was still getting used to this whole relationship thing where a person comes into your life with all these other people.

Amelie had a sister. A dead sister, as of three days ago.

He tried to say the right things —I’m sorry…

We’re gonna be okay— and he did his best to hide the bad stuff, like the fact that he was a bit happy about the situation.

Amelie was taking in the kids, so they were gonna be a big family.

It was a relief, the shameful kind you had to keep to yourself, but Abel felt safe knowing that Amelie would need him even more now.

And then it was bad clockwork. His thoughts drifted back to the bandanna, to the blood.

“Did you know about the gun?” he’d said.

She looked at him like he was bad. Off.

“The report,” Abel said. “Your husband had a gun on him, no?”

“Well, of course I knew about the gun.”

She was lying again. “Oh.”

“Look,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, okay?

I told you… I’m a fuckup. But I’m not an idiot.

Do you want to know the truth? Do you want to know how I am?

How we were? I loved that gun, okay? Kip fucked me with that gun, and sometimes he put it in my mouth while we were fucking.

The night he died, before he went to the store, he said he would kill me and the baby and himself with that gun if this fucking ‘superflu’ ever came for us, and it turned me on so much to think of him killing us in one fell swoop that before he went to the store… I fucked him again.”

“Abel.”

Now was now. Room 24. Amelie held a pillow and scowled. “Smell this.”

Abel loved that he still loved her despite her being a filthy whore, a disgusting liar, the kind of illogical woman who doesn’t fear a deadly flu but questions a hotel pillow.

Some lies were good. All her dirty talk was bogus.

Kip didn’t have a gun. That gun belonged to Abel’s father, and then to Abel, not to Kip.

Never. And Abel was more than happy to play along.

He lifted the pillow to his face, half expected her to come at him, smother him. No dice, and he declared the pillow “fresh as a daisy” and then jumped on the bed and smiled at her. One of these days, she would be her old self. She would smile back at him.

She glared at his torso, at his feet. Was he ugly? Fat?

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll take my shoes off.”

“We can’t sleep in the same bed.”

Where did it go? The love. It wasn’t gone. It was just hiding. Afraid of good things like Abel’s angelic ways, his gentle hands, his good-boy pecker.

“Look,” she said. “I told you… I need a minute.”

This again. The way she liked to list all the bad things.

Losing her house, her husband, her sister.

He obliged and moved to the other bed, fighting the big new fear.

What if her love wasn’t hiding? What if it was gone and he was only in this room because Amelie was afraid to drive to Boise on her own?

Afraid, and maybe lazy.

But then she pulled at her sundress. The one from the day they met.