Page 41 of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand
PREY INSTINCT
Hailey Piper
The killing comes easier when you see what people really are. What threats they can become.
Since Helena. After her, the rest haven’t mattered, rare as they are. Humans and bullets have that in common. Rare and deadly.
But only humans can pretend they’re harmless, like the gaunt-faced woman dropping to the sand in her loose jeans and once-white tank top.
It’s a steady, unpanicked shot through her heart.
She should be dead instantly, at least from the outside.
What abyss she’s experiencing within is anyone’s guess.
“Should’ve stayed away,” Silvia whispers, the wind brushing auburn locks into her scrutinizing eyes. “I warned you.”
Crimson stains the sand, but Silvia’s pale hands look clear of blood. The woman never touched her. Not the deadly captain, only another of his crew. If she’d left with everyone else, she could’ve found a softer way to die.
Silvia should’ve left, too, rather than hiding in that forgotten beach house these past two weeks.
On the third night, she watched camo-clad soldiers dump bodies off the northern rocks, into the outgoing tide.
One or two might have sounded like a flat palm smacking the waves.
A spill of hundreds sounded like violent rain.
Gone now. The beach has been quiet, at least until this dead woman’s appearance, and her carelessness is just the beginning of Silvia’s troubles today. She watches another one mounting offshore, the kind she can’t gun down.
There’s no more weather service to predict storms, no definitive channel to explain if that sharp wind is a summer squall or a monstrous hurricane.
But Silvia knows a predator when she sees one. The dimming sky gives a tiger’s throaty roar, and from the sooty horizon climbs a black and bulging tower of cloud, with lightning forking ivy-like up its outer walls.
A new vessel for Captain Trips. Eager to learn how Silvia tastes.
None of it seemed real when Helena was alive.
Silvia was already struggling to keep her goony act booked for children’s birthday parties—too many kids shrank in terror at clowns lately, her magic act was rusty, and she was aging out of playing a careful-of-copyright Barbie knockoff.
When work dribbled away entirely, she’d taken it as a sign to seek a new career.
Not a sign of the world’s end. The reports and subsequent denial on TV at first seemed less intense than hers and Helena’s time with the hospice boys, keeping them entertained and accompanied, wondering if the I in AIDS should stand for Inevitable . Even if sometimes inevitability wasn’t the case.
“Lost in another puzzle?” Helena asked, striding inside the house. She could tell the difference between Silvia watching TV and Silvia daydreaming at the screen.
Her stare turned to Helena, soaking in her tall figure and tan face and endless sprawl of golden curls as if she stood on an entirely different planet from the news.
“Thinking about names,” Silvia said. “For diseases. Like AIDS. And Captain Trips.”
“Oh?” Helena dropped her keys in the door-side bowl.
Silvia tucked her throat muscles down and deepened her voice into a Sam the Eagle impression. “A good name. An American name.”
Helena turned, and the TV’s reflection flickered in her pretty earthen eyes. “We’re going to want jugs for water. And canned food. Nonperishables.”
“It’s that serious?” Silvia asked.
“Bush-league president says what he says, I say what I say.” Helena spoke with such confidence, you could believe she knew the future.
You could even believe she knew how to survive it.
Silvia had understood since they met in the hospice halls, two hopeful angels lost in grim space, that Helena was the smarter one, the leader.
Lucky Silvia to orbit that star—the doctor and the fool.
Helena made sense. Besides, it seemed almost silly to believe that tiny DNA fragments could crush the power of human civilization.
Sensible under a microscope, even in a movie, but hard to believe when looking out the window and seeing no such doom in the air.
As invisible as a deity, and almost as deniable.
At least until the coughing began. Until the virus cored Silvia’s world.
Partway up the narrow, tree-guarded road, Silvia accepts that she can’t outrun the storm.
She clutches a lavender umbrella overhead, rain or shine, since no one’s manufacturing more sunblock anytime soon, and both sun and storm are predators.
Or it’s all Captain Trips, sticking out vicious tongues from different mouths.
His storm-tongue licks at Silvia’s heels.
She’s been walking for hours, and the patchy paved road has curled too far from the beach houses to turn back, zigzagging between coastal brush and a thicket of birch trees.
This has always been a remote route, tucked away from the nearby town.
Vacationers used to pretend the coast hid them from the world, and maybe it did once.
But that didn’t save them.
Thunder groans as if the sky has only known aching.
Silvia jogs, but the pack clinging to her shoulders hangs heavy with water jugs.
A rolled-up sleeping bag mounts its top, while the insides hold bagged jerky, broken Pop-Tarts, bandages, the vacancy of spare ammunition, toothpaste, a toothbrush, tampons, and changes of clothing.
She swapped outfits right after gunning down the gaunt woman. Off with the jeans and T-shirt, on with a white blouse and blue checkerboard dress. That woman’s soul can tell Captain Trips a jeans-wearing stranger killed her.
Meanwhile, Silvia has become Dorothy of Oz.
Not the most practical outfit for basic survival, but at least she’ll fool Death himself for a time. A couple more costumes await in case she meets more of his crew.
When did she stop calling the virus an it and start calling the virus he ? Probably after Helena. Around when the dreams began.
Lost in another puzzle?
Silvia shakes herself to full attention as another rumble jostles the sky. She can’t afford to daydream, let alone catnap. The trees stand thinner ahead—
And then bleary darkness closes around her. The air turns soupy as if she’s stepped inside a tremendous mouth and the road is one long tongue.
Someone haunts the throat behind her. She shouldn’t look back at the sound of clacking footsteps, hates herself for it, but can’t help glancing over one shoulder where smoke ripples beneath a burnt sky, vibrant as a tiger’s pelt.
And against it strides his silhouette. He isn’t subtle in dreams. No gaunt woman, no virus. Only a figure crystallizing into the world, calling again to her as if, through his touch, she can go home.
She bolts along the road-tongue, toward what she hopes are the gray teeth of—
Daylight. Or what passes for it as the coastal storm creeps onto land. Silvia has run all the way to waking up.
“Stop,” she whispers, wishing she could suck tears back into her eyes. She can’t keep letting the dreams catch up, especially not during the day.
But she also doesn’t know how to stop them. Only to keep moving.
The road splits into a Y-shaped fork, one prong aiming at civilization, the other at the interstate.
Since two weeks ago, when Silvia last saw town, it has transformed into a hell of barbed-wire checkpoints, traffic-jammed roads, untended storefronts, and a violent stench that makes her lips peel back from her teeth in revulsion.
There aren’t any National Guardsmen prowling the checkpoint. A closer look tells Silvia they took their guns and ammo with them.
But not before punching bullet holes across the hoods and windshields of the nearest vehicles lying dormant at the checkpoint.
The cars and trucks coating Main Street must be full of families, all believing they could be the lucky escapees.
Like there’s anywhere safe to go. Some of them might have ducked into the woods on foot, but most would’ve wanted their vehicles for distance.
And they died in those vehicles. A black blanket drapes the chrome-clogged asphalt with TV static. Main Street has become a world for flies.
Eventually the sun will chew through car paint, and the flies and their maggoty children will chew through the bodies, and they will hunt more corpses for growing and feeding and fucking. Small birds will have their fill, and things that eat them will have theirs, too.
Silvia turns with her stomach; all she can do to keep from vomiting over her blue Dorothy dress.
The storm clears its throat, urging her onward, but not this way.
Its wind thrusts against her umbrella, bending its spokes until two of them snap.
She tosses it to the roadside. Should’ve closed it before the storm broke it.
And she’d better find shelter before the storm breaks her as well.
On the path aiming for the interstate, the trees open their green-and-white fortress at a gravelly dip leading into a gas station.
A small wooden sign reads FILL UP BEFORE YOU HEAD OUT!
in sunshiny lettering. Black hoses dangle alongside four red-and-steel pumps, and behind them sits the flat-roofed station.
Its broad windows face the road, but solid concrete protects its other three sides.
Silvia glances at the angry sky and then back to the station. “Okay then.”
Nearby tree limbs stroke one another, first with a lover’s gentleness, and then a lover’s ferocity. One last glance down Main Street shows a windy ripple in the insect blanket like fingertips brushing a coat of black hair.
The captain is near.
Silvia jogs along the tree line toward the gas station. Her ears catch a thin wooden crack-crack from the woods, and then another, almost footsteps through the underbrush. This storm might be chewing the trees. Or there might be someone here.