Page 36 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Sandra walks and walks. The tennis shoes are good.

Nothing hurts, nothing rubs her the wrong way.

She walks past rotting bodies, and scorched or abandoned cars.

She walks past broken and forgotten things—pieces of a radio, a brown shoe, a kitchen knife, an open briefcase with some papers still inside it, a bicycle tire, a toothbrush, a book for children with a small bear wearing a blue tutu on the cover.

She walks past houses that are full of dead people.

Some have their doors open. Scavengers were common the first few days.

She wonders how many of those houses have little beds and cradles with—

No. Sandra shuts that thought down immediately.

No good will come of it. But the things we try to silence inside ourselves are usually the ones that scream the loudest, and Sandra can’t help but think of millions of cradles across the world, all of them with dead, bloated babies inside.

All of them covered with flies and, soon after, full of squirming maggots feasting on the flesh of those who were supposed to be the future, those who were the apple of someone’s eye, those who made the world better just by being in it, with their big smiles and little hands and pure hearts.

Baby Angie . Tired and broken, Sandra lets the memories flood in.

Baby Angie playing. Baby Angie giggling.

Baby Angie squeezing handfuls of mashed potatoes, her dirty little face full of glee.

Baby Angie splashing in the tub. Each memory is a gem covered in thorns that fills her heart while ripping it apart.

Half an hour later, Sandra starts thinking about the possibility of finding the boat and being taken to a better place, to a new community. Maybe there she can find hope again.

A big mongoose interrupts her thoughts. It walks out from behind the burned metallic skeleton of an overturned van that sits in the middle of the road.

It’s as big as a small dog. It’s the biggest Sandra has ever seen.

It looks swollen. Clearly infected. Saliva and something thicker fall from its mouth.

Sandra stops walking and keeps her eyes on the animal.

The mongoose makes that little growling thing they do. It’s a deep, primal sound that sends a shiver down Sandra’s spine despite the heat. Every instinct in her body tells her to turn and run. Then she remembers the gun.

Sandra slowly brings her right hand up and pulls the gun from her waist.

The mongoose hisses and walks away before Sandra has time to aim. She’s glad. Infected or not, she didn’t want to shoot it. She watches as the animal trots over a front yard and disappears around a house.

Two weeks ago, she wouldn’t have thought she would ever touch Miguel’s gun.

She didn’t even want it in the house. But then everything collapsed, and she watched as people turned into savages, stealing, breaking into homes, running around in absolute anarchy, and slaughtering each other in the streets.

Now she is sure she will pull the trigger.

About half a mile later, the residential part of town ends and Sandra walks onto a much larger road.

This one will take her to the beach. She’s halfway there.

The thought of reaching the beach injects a bit of energy into her system and Sandra speeds up a bit, happy to no longer be surrounded by houses full of dead people.

But the big avenue is no better. Cars are piled everywhere, and many of them contain bodies. The stench is even worse than it was before. Here, it’s also mixed with the smell of gasoline and charred things.

A while later, the driver’s door of a black Lincoln Town Car opens about twenty feet in front of Sandra and a man stumbles out. He’s wearing dirty jeans and no shirt or shoes. He looks like a corpse that’s been in the water for too long. He takes a few steps toward Sandra.

“Stop,” Sandra says. Fear has made her voice weak, and the screaming from the previous night isn’t doing her any favors.

The man snarls, shakes his head, and moves toward her.

The oily sweat and swollen face are clear signs that he’s infected, but it still takes a moment for Sandra to make up her mind.

The shot is too loud. It feels like Sandra split the day in half.

It pings against the car. He keeps walking.

Sandra takes a breath and aims again. The second shot is just as loud, but there’s no metallic ping.

It hits the guy in the stomach. He falls to his knees and grunts.

Sandra squeezes the trigger one more time.

The left side of the man’s face explodes in a puff of red and pink.

Sandra walks around the man, making sure he’s not moving. Her hands are shaking.

You killed a man.

The voice doesn’t sound panicky or judgmental. Sandra ignores it and keeps walking past more cars, more bodies, more destruction.

The big avenue bends left before you see the beach.

There’s a Blockbuster on the corner before you have to turn.

Sandra can see the blue of its marquee from where she’s standing.

She’s close to the beach. Sandra looks at her watch.

10:15 a.m. She’s going to make it. She takes a moment to drink some water and eat a few crackers.

An uneventful hour later, Sandra is at the beach.

There are no bodies on the sand. She’s grateful for that.

The ocean is a darker blue than the sky.

A few white clouds hang over the ocean. The palm trees and the sand and the few white clouds paint a pretty picture.

For a while, Sandra sits near the ocean and allows her surroundings to dim the horrors in her head.

The horizon is an unperturbed line. By noon, it remains the same. Untouched. Empty. Unbroken.

By 1:00 p.m., Sandra begins to wonder what midday might mean to other people.

At 2:30 p.m., she gets up and pees behind a palm tree, looking around before she does, even though she hasn’t seen a soul since the sick man she shot on the road.

Time keeps on keeping on.

2:55 p.m.

Sandra gets up and walks the length of the beach, scouring the horizon for a boat.

3:17 p.m.

The waves are never quiet. Birds make noises from time to time.

A small crab makes a mad dash to some unknown destination.

The world is dead, but life goes on here and there.

An insect. A bird. Palm trees. The rock keeps spinning without people.

It makes Sandra think about what the world would look like with everyone gone, with not even a single survivor.

It’s easy to imagine it now. All she has to do is look around.

All the emptiness fills her with a new kind of sadness.

We’re nothing but cosmic dust floating in an infinite beam of light.

4:00 p.m.

Anxiety tickles Sandra’s heart with a feather like a scalpel.

4:25 p.m.

Sandra walks the beach again. She remembers Baby Angie’s pink bathing suit with its circle of tiny blue fish.

She thinks about grabbing the gun, walking into water until it reaches her waist, and then blowing her brains out.

She thinks about her body sinking, becoming one with the ocean, turning into sand, her particles living forever in this gorgeous place.

4:43 p.m.

Desperation sets in.

5:12 p.m.

You messed up. The voice doesn’t sound like her mother now. It sounds like an angry demon. You killed a man.

6:02 p.m.

Sandra is sitting again. Midday, no matter how you think of it, is gone. The sun has started moving down. The beach is not so big that Sandra would have missed a boat, especially not one with a motor.

It all makes sense. There is no boat. Of course there is no boat. There never was.

Mercedes’s mother didn’t buy a ticket for her daughter; she bought a ticket to a dream.

There is no boat because people are dead everywhere. There is no boat because it was all a lie someone told Mercedes’s mom. Because people can be good to each other when things go bad, like she and Mercedes had been to each other. But people can also be awful when things go bad. Like now.

The sunset is an explosion of neon orange splashed with purple at its edges. The ocean keeps singing its endless song, the waves worrying about nothing as their unceasing rhythm caresses the shore.

In the Caribbean, night comes at you fast, almost aggressively. Like a warning.

Sandra drinks the last of her water and eats the last stale cracker.

She has two options now. She can turn around and try to walk back home.

There’s nothing waiting for her there except the rotting bodies of her daughter and her husband.

But home is always home. Maybe she can wait and see where things go.

Maybe enough people survive, and they start again.

Maybe the government finds a cure soon. She can wait.

She can scavenge. She still has a few bullets left.

She can put duct tape around Baby Angie’s door and her bedroom door to keep the smell under control.

The second option is to walk into the ocean. Maybe at the bottom of the ocean, away from people, she can find some hope.

Sandra stands up and starts walking.