Page 37 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
WRONG FUCKING PLACE, WRONG FUCKING TIME
C. Robert Cargill
Derek Cerny and Alan Mahr had always joked that Roosevelt, Texas, would be a great town if it weren’t for all the people, and as it turned out, they were pretty much right.
Gone was the busybody Baptist mother of four, whose children had all long since found their way to Fredericksburg or Austin—as far as they could reasonably get from her.
Gone was the bully of a sheriff’s deputy, Willy Boggs, who sat outside of McCready’s Bar on Friday and Saturday nights, ready to write a citation if anyone so much as looked drunk—only for Sheriff Dean to let them out the next morning without a fuss or ticket.
Gone was Sheriff Dean, who, while not a bad guy, was still the law in a place that didn’t really need it and spent a little too much time trying to justify his position.
Gone was the local rancher, Spike McInroy, who, while giving Derek and Alan their longtime gainful employment, paid them as little as he could get away with while keeping them both from quitting and finding something better.
Gone was pretty much everyone who thought little of two ranch hands who believed the best part of the week was sitting down with a twelve-pack of Budweiser to watch a double feature of horror movies rented from Old Gil’s video store.
They were by no stretch two of life’s winners, but they weren’t without their charms.
Roosevelt was a certified ghost town long before Captain Trips paid it a visit.
It was one of the places you would expect to see Trips last, if at all.
Just shy of one hundred people lived on the swaths of land that flanked both sides of Interstate 10 on the long, flat stretch of road smack in the middle of an eight-hour drive from San Antonio to El Paso.
What had started as a mining community had faltered, contracted, and become more of a glorified truck stop than a town.
It was home to two sorts of people—those that owned or worked the handful of vast ranches, and those that served the highway and its myriad of travelers.
In a way, the highway was far more important to the town than the ranchers, and thus it was folks like Violet May, Terrence McCready, and Old Gil who were in the chief seats of power in the town.
Violet owned the combination gas station/diner, the single most frequented business fifty miles either way—she served a mean Salisbury steak with the best cheddar grits anywhere in Texas.
Terrence owned the bar, which arguably brought in more money than Violet, though much of that was from locals, which did less for the economy overall.
And Gil owned both motels along the highway, the first being the one he inherited from his father, the other bought from Garrett Meyer upon his retirement.
The reception this far out for anything resembling a television station was pretty much terrible.
On a clear night, you could get a good atmospheric bounce and pick up a handful of fuzzy Austin stations, but for the most part, it was a wasteland of mind-numbing UHF television from a variety of smaller towns.
You know, lots of preacher talk and Mayberry R.F.D. reruns.
Tired of complaints from travelers just wanting to relax in front of the TV after a long drive, Old Gil made a deal with a trucker for a couple dozen VHS players to fall off the back of his truck.
Gil installed each room with a player and combed stores all over Central Texas to amass a collection of tapes unrivaled anywhere outside of the big cities.
Truckers had taken to putting combination TV/VHS players in the back of their cabs and so Gil started a video-swap service, which not only kept a steady traffic coming through his shop, but also kept it full of strange and exotic films from all over.
Soon after opening, the video store—Moonrise Video—was taking in more revenue than its sister businesses, the Moonrise Motel and the Friendly 8 Roadside Inn, combined.
And for two ranch hands like Alan and Derek, it meant despite living this far out in the middle of nowhere, they had access to all the movies they could ever want. And it took only one visit from Captain Trips to the video store to make it such that they were two of its last remaining customers.
It took less than a week for Trips to clear out the rest of town.
There was a lot that could be said about Alan and Derek, and even as small as the town had been, a lot had been.
But when people stopped showing up for their shifts, when the diner failed to open and the Roosevelt Food Mart didn’t flick its neon on, the boys went to work.
They checked in on folks, cared for who they found still breathing, and one by one buried almost every single person in Roosevelt.
There were no authorities to come and claim bodies, no ambulances willing to drive this far out in a pandemic.
No, it was up to the last remaining people of Roosevelt to care for themselves and their kin.
“I reckon we should wear masks or something,” said Derek as he shoveled a pile of vomit from beside the Widow Harper’s bed.
“What for?” asked Alan. “Ain’t no mask gonna stop us from doin’ this ourselves. If we’re gonna get it, we’re gonna get it.”
“I meant about the smell.”
“You don’t wear a goddamned mask when you’re shoveling cattle shit. Why start now?”
“Well, I mean, I’m used to the cattle shit. This is a rotting body.”
“It’s all decomposition and undigested material, dumbass.”
“That’s a fair point,” said Derek. “It just don’t smell remotely the same.”
“Widow Harper deserves better than to be treated like trash to be taken out.”
“That woman hated you.”
“Most women hate me.”
“Hated.”
“There are still some left, I suppose,” said Alan.
“You suppose our odds have improved?” asked Derek genuinely.
“I reckon they have to. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless mostly men survive.”
“Well, that would suck.”
“No more than it sucked before.”
“That’s fair.”
“Still think the woman deserves to be handled with care and not treated like a fuckin’ biohazard.”
“All right, all right, I’ll lay off about the mask.”
The two resigned men carried on like this, chatting away, trying to figure out the What next?
of it all, while collecting, boxing up, and burying the residents of Roosevelt in a large field beside the highway.
They set up a system to make sure they remembered exactly who was buried where, and at night, the two would craft and then hand-carve crosses for each of them.
Not everyone in Roosevelt was Christian or practicing, but this being Texas, everyone at least pretended, and so Derek and Alan didn’t really know better and gave them all crosses anyway. Even Mrs. Levenson.
It wouldn’t be until toward the end of the first week that the pair would discover that they were not, in fact, alone.
Bill Pertwee was a few years older than the boys and had mostly grown up around them.
He didn’t think much of them, nor they of him, but they’d never had any beef between the three of them and had always been cordial when running into one another.
So, it was a bit uncomfortable the moment the two pulled onto his property in Alan’s El Camino and Bill met them on his porch aiming a shotgun at the pair.
“Ain’t nothin’ here worth gettin’ shot over stealin’, boys!” he called out as the two got out of their car.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” yelled Alan, throwing his hands in the air.
Derek, on the other hand, held his arms out, palms open wide, giving the universal sign for Yo, chill the fuck out . “We ain’t here to steal shit, Bill. We’s just here to check on you and the girls. Everyone okay?”
“We don’t need no checking in on.”
“That may be so, but if that’s true, you, me, Alan, and the girls are the only ones left alive in town. We just wanted to see who’s still alive and take care of those that don’t have much time left.”
Bill narrowed his eyes and lowered his gun.
He motioned over toward an ancient magnolia tree to the side of his house.
There beneath it, underneath the massive off-white spring blossoms, were three mounds and three crosses.
One each for his wife and daughters. “Ain’t none but just me left.
And I don’t reckon I’m much longer for this world. ”
“You sick?” asked Derek.
Bill looked down at the shotgun in his hands. “Nope.”
Alan and Derek nodded, exchanging glances. Then Derek reached into the El Camino and pulled out a battered Coleman cooler, holding it up like a peace offering. “Nice thing about six-packs is they split up evenly both two and three ways.”
Bill looked at the two idiots for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, come on in.”
The three sat quietly for the next hour, someone only occasionally breaking the silence to ask an easily answered question.
Bill was curious how everyone had gone, and Derek tried to find a way to get him to open up about the girls.
But Bill would not budge on that front. So they drank, made the smallest of small talk, and when the sixth beer was crumpled in Bill’s hand, the three stood up with a “Welp, time to get back at it.”
On their way out the door, Alan turned back in to face Bill. “Me and Derek have been hitting up Moonrise Video about six o’ clock. We’re usually back at our place by seven. If you got nothin’ to do and feel like being around some folk, stop by and watch some movies with us.”
“We got beer,” said Derek.
“I reckon you do,” said Bill. “We’ll see.”
Come six o’ clock, the boys were walking the aisles of Moonrise—having gotten the keys off Old Gil’s limp corpse that had, just as Gil would have wanted it, expired slumped over the front desk of his motel, never having missed a day of work due to illness in his life.
Of course, how many people he may have given the Trips as a result was something he would have to stand judgment for on his own.