Page 39 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand

Alan continued. “But when you talk about the basics, the fundamentals of what makes horror horror , there are just two types. Scary horror, in which we feel terror through empathy, and catharsis, in which we watch people who really deserve it get their just desserts.”

“The hell are you talking about?” asked Bill.

“Yeah,” asked Derek. “The fuck did this all come from?”

“They write books about this stuff. I got curious, so I’ve bought some when I visited Austin last time.”

“You read this in a book?” asked Bill.

“No. Fangoria ,” said Alan. Bill’s stare became somehow blanker. “It’s a magazine.”

“You read this magazine?” asked Bill of Derek.

“I fall asleep like three pages into reading anything,” joked Derek. “This is all new to me.”

“Look,” said Alan bluntly. “If you like someone, a character, you get scared for them. You get scared with them. What the Greeks called tragedy. When you don’t like someone, like a character you fucking hate, like someone who reminds you of that dick from work or a jackass neighbor, you enjoy watching them die, getting their just desserts.

What the Greeks would pair with comedy.”

“What does any of this have to do with slasher killers?” asked Bill, becoming more confused by the minute.

“What all this means is that sometimes it’s okay to like watching slasher killers kill the fuck out of some annoying prick in a wheelchair like Franklin, and at the same time be scared for Sally.

These guys become not just the figures in our nightmares, but expressions of our frustration and rage at how unfair life is. ”

“Wait,” said Bill, struck by a bolt of inspiration. “You’re saying the slashers are us. And the guys chasing us.”

“They can be, yeah,” said Alan. “You know… metaphorically.”

“ Fuuuuuck ,” Bill said, sighing out the entire middle of the word.

“Shit, man,” said Derek. “You got all that from a magazine?”

“Where the hell else am I gonna get it, doofus?” Alan smarted off.

“Fair enough.”

Bill nodded. “Y’all mind if I just sit here for a spell?”

“Mi casa, you casa,” said Derek.

No one moved, and for ten minutes they all sat in silence, sipping their beers, Alan and Derek growing ever more nervous as each wordless minute ticked by. The tension grew so thick, it boiled over inside of Derek and words just burst out of his mouth. “So, what would you do differently?” he asked.

Bill and Alan looked up. Derek was looking right at Bill, so everyone knew who he meant.

“Do what differently?” he asked in return.

“You know. With all this Captain Trips nonsense. If you had things to do differently, what would you do?”

“Nothing,” said Bill.

“Nothing at all?”

“Derek,” said Alan pointedly.

“No, it’s okay,” said Bill. “I know what he’s asking.”

“Yeah, but it ain’t any of our business,” said Alan.

“The hell it ain’t. Y’all invite me into your home, take me in as one of your own.

Hell, I’ve spent more time with you two beautiful clowns than any other grown man I’ve known in my whole adult life.

Least I can do is answer a real question like that.

You mean Sophie and the girls. Knowing what I know now, what would I do to protect them? ”

“Yeah,” said Derek. “Yeah. That’s about the size of it.”

“Nothing I could do. You, me, Alan. The three of us are just immune or something. God’s will, I guess.

Whatever the fuck that is. I’ve never been the churchy type.

But God, no God, that sickness was gonna take ’em one way or another.

They was just born in the wrong fucking place at the wrong fucking time.

But I reckon that was always gonna be the case. ”

“Does that make you mad?” asked Derek.

“Every goddamned day.”

Derek nodded and the three sat in silence finishing their beers.

Before he left, Bill looked at the boys and cocked his head a little, like he was conflicted whether or not to even speak.

Then the thought got the best of him, and he scratched his neck, squinting his eyes, trying to make his most intrusive thoughts sound casual.

“Y’all…” he began, taking a long pause. “Y’all been having strange dreams or anything? ”

Derek and Alan looked at each other nervously. They had, but neither had mentioned it to the other. “Yeah,” they both said in unison.

“Like, I’ve been having this… weird dream. Night after night. A dark figure standing along the highway. Behind him, I see Las Vegas. He wants me to go with him. He says I don’t have to be alone anymore. Y’all have something like that?”

Derek and Alan shook their heads. They hadn’t.

“No,” said Derek. “I’ve actually just been dreaming about this nice old lady.” Alan looked at him, confused, as he’d had the same dream, but decided not to speak up. That sounded too weird to him.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Bill. “It’s the stress. Losing the girls and all. Just weird dreams.” He stood up, nodded a polite goodbye, and went home.

The next morning, Derek and Alan went about their morning rounds, first hitting up their ranch chores, feeding the cattle, collecting eggs, and making sure all the water troughs were full and clean. Then they went about their afternoon rounds, seeing that all was quiet and well in town.

As they made their rounds, they gave a wave to Bill, who was cutting up a cord of wood at the front of his property with a chain saw in both hands.

He revved the beast and raised it high before giving a small pirouette like Leatherface at the end of Chain Saw .

The two laughed at the little joke and rode on, not giving it a second thought.

One might think it strange how comfortable the three seemed living in a town populated mostly by the dead, but in truth, they had done so for so long that it seemed mostly normal.

Working on the ranch, the boys could go a few days seeing no one at all but each other, so they fell rapidly into a groove of normalcy, despite the whole world having gone silent so quickly.

They were sure the power would go out any day now, so they’d long since had the generators on standby, and with the truck stop gassed up to the gills, they imagined there would be some semblance of governmental return to civility before they ever ran out of juice.

But if there wasn’t, they always had their batteries.

So, life was quaint, quiet, and uncomplicated.

Derek was the first to notice the shattered glass door of the Roosevelt Food Mart.

They weren’t large enough of a town to have a proper grocery store, so they relied upon a glorified general store generously named Food Mart .

The boys had mostly left it alone at this point, relying upon their own sundries and what was a mostly self-sustaining ranch.

But seeing the front door smashed in sent a chill down both of their spines as they worried that their backup plan might be a bust as a result of some highway thieves.

“Shit,” Alan pointedly swore.

“What?” asked Derek.

“We left the shotguns at home.”

“Folks are probably just hungry.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to be too careful.”

“We got a tire iron in the back of the truck.”

Alan nodded. “I reckon that’ll have to do.”

He grabbed the iron from the bed of his old truck, and they crept carefully, quietly, toward the front door.

“Oh, thank God,” came a soft, enthusiastic voice from inside. “Men!”

The boys stopped in their tracks. From the dark of the Food Mart emerged a shape.

A shapely shape. The shapely shape of a rather attractive woman.

It had been weeks now since the boys had seen a live woman, and significantly longer since they’d seen one this pretty.

She had blond hair spilling down over her shoulders, bright blue eyes that looked like pools of water on a travel brochure you’d find in a motel lobby, and a sprinkle of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

Around her neck hung a simple gold cross—no Jesus, just the cross. A good Protestant girl.

“What?” called another soft voice from the dark behind her. Another woman, slightly taller, but thinner, with dark brown hair cascading down her back, wearing a black Judas Priest T-shirt, slipped up behind the first, bag of groceries in her hands. “Oh!” she exclaimed, pleasantly surprised.

“Ladies,” said Derek.

“Gentlemen,” said the blonde.

“Y’all ain’t from around here.”

“Riiiight,” said the brunette.

“Any reason y’all are busting up our Food Mart?”

“Oh shit,” said the brunette. “You own this place?”

“Nah,” said Alan. “We’s just looking after it for the owner.”

“Is he dead? You know, from the Trips?” asked the blonde.

“Presently,” said Derek, drawing a contemptuous look from Alan.

Presently? Alan mouthed silently.

“So, you aren’t so much looking after it for him as claiming it,” said the brunette.

“Mary!” exclaimed the blonde. “Be nice. This isn’t our town.”

“Okay, okay. I’m just saying,” she said, not really apologizing.

“What’re y’all doing around here?” asked Derek.

“Our car ran out of gas up on I-10,” said the blonde.

“Yeah,” said Mary. “Do you know how hard it is out there to find an open gas station?”

“How bad is it out there?” asked Alan.

“We’ve heard this is happening everywhere,” said Derek.

“Oh, it is,” said the blonde. “Everyone is dying out there. Almost nothing works anymore. And Mary’s right. Finding gas stations with anyone working them is impossible.”

“I’m Derek. This is Alan. Where are y’all headed?”

“Vegas,” the two girls said together.

“No shit,” said Alan. “Our buddy was just talking about Vegas last night.”

“You thinking about going to Vegas?” asked the blonde.

“Is that an invitation?” asked Derek, cranking the charm to what he thought was a Roosevelt eleven, but was actually more of a dive bar three.

Alan punched him in the arm. “Knock it off. These ladies have bigger problems than dealing with you.”

The blonde smiled. “Oh, I don’t mind a little innocent flirting. Been a while since we met nice boys.”

“Really?” asked Derek.